[Oberon] Notebook and Bluebottle (2)

[Chris Hafey]

On Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 18:23:06 +0200, edgar at edgarschwarz.de wrote:

> Message-ID: <200508191623.j7JGN6ew014734 at post.webmailer.de>

> XP System is telling me:
> - VIA Rhine II Fast Ethernet Adapter
> - Ralink RT2500 Wireless LAN Card
> - NO Floppy -> DVD Dual Layer instead.

> Any more ideas what to do with this hardware ?

Only to install the Alpha Native Oberon and install Bluebottle that
way, rather than from a Bluebottle CDROM.  May want to add a FAT-16
partition if you do it this way.  I've got a few laptops going in
Linux by swapping out the hard disk and placing it into another
system with appropriate boot media (diskette drive usually). Then
transplant back to the target and (hopefully) make any repairs
required, once booted.

By 'Alpha' I simply mean the ETH 'Alpha' distrib. of Oberon.
Older version of N.O. (notably 'Stable') was inappropriate
for later Bluebottle installation (only Alpha was able to format
the target hard disk partition to Bluebottle standards).

I've only installed Native Oberon via diskette (Oberon0.Dsk) so
I do not know if this is a practical approach for your needs.

>From within Alpha Native Oberon it seems to me the textual config
for AOS should be accessible.  When I installed Bluebottle, I did
so (on this IBM 770 laptop, mfgr. circa 1999) using only Alpha
N.O.; bootstrapping into Bluebottle was as simple as adding an
extra line to Linux's lilo.conf (the line was identical to that
used to boot Native Oberon, with of course a different partition
made reference to -- and Linux was previously installed on only
part of the hard disk, which was convenient when it came time to
get N.O. and Bluebottle going on this system).

Seems to me Oberon0.Dsk (as supplied for Alpha) is in essence a
suitable Bluebottle boot disk (indirectly) in that all the above
bootstrapping was done based on using it (except for the LILO
part which can be accomplished with a Linux boot diskette, CDROM
etc. without ever installing Linux, proper).  Your comment seems
to indicate you do not have a floppy drive to boot from, though.

I wonder if your DVD drive is at the root of some of your
problems here.  I had difficulties with Native Oberon and LILO;
Fortunately, Alpha was good and allowed boot from hard disk
under LILO boot management.  It appeared that GRUB would have
fared no better (and is at any rate what I started with before
migrating to LILO).

Seems also that the VESA mode(s) should suffice to gain Bluebottle.
I have read that it is possible to install Linux via RS-232-C
when the video hardware simply will not cooperate during boot-
strapping phase of installation.  The RS-232-C port plays the
role of a terminal here (not as a link to mass media storage).

Eventually, of course, the video hardware has to function, but
boot media is notoriously terse (in functionality) on nearly
any system I've worked with.

Hope this is of some use to you.
Regards, Christopher, WA1TNR in Torrington CT USA 73W 41N