Friday 8 July 2011

EasyMiNT again...

After using aranym+freemint for a while I found I didn't have any space left on my development ext2 partition. I suspect there are much easier ways of sorting this out, but here's what I did.. Basically this was just to get the basic 'sparemint' rpm distribution installed (basic unix filesystem) + a few extra utils.

So my starting point is a drive C (gem) and drive d (512meg ext) partitions. Somehow I have previously downloaded a system that boots to the emutos desktop but running mint. I have easymint: em.170 which I suspect is from the file EM_170.zip downloaded from massi Soft.
I'd reconfigured the system to boot from E. which actually turned out to be fine because my 'C' boot up didn't work, it also appears that EasyMiNT requires a working mint.
Before you re-run easymint - the installer,
-check that there are a bunch of files in c/em.170/pakete/
Files are *.tar and *.list.
-delete the tmp folder in c/easymint/tmp -- this tells easymint that it needs to start again from scratch.

The problem I had was that I wanted to replace drive D with a bigger one. So I had to create a blank ext2 partition. You can save yourself so much time by using either the built in one in aranym but instead I installed something on the mac called "Ext2FS_1.4d4"
All that was just so I could type dd and mkfs according to these instructions..

So after all that pain I had a working 1.5 gig ext2 partition.. for the record:
>dd if=/dev/zero of=./gigtest.img bs=1024k count=1536
>/usr/local/sbin/mke2fs ./gigtest.img
but mostly there must be an easier way (eg; find a debian machine and tar.gz the results..)

So the extra pain was that there were alot of trouble editing files on the C drive so that I could re-run easymint. And more pain trying stuff where drive C just wouldn't boot up.

Oh, the final result... (if only the terminal would let me copy and paste)..

>df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
c:/ 250M 225M 25M 90% u:/
d:/ 1.5G 329M 1.1G 22% u:/
e:/ 37T 23T 14T 62% u:/
r:/ 262M 8.0k 261M 1% u:/
u:/ 1.5G 329M 1.1G 22% u:/

So it looks like the base install uses 329 meg.