ELKS bootable CD

[toncho11]

I generated a bootable CD from the 1440 minix image:

minix-boot-cd.zip

I tested it with https://copy.sh/v86/ and it works using El Torito "floppy emulation". There are no floppies on many even older laptops.

• a CD is big enough to hold Nano X for example
• easier testing on real hardware - you avoid coping to floppies, second copy after the installation to add the files that did not fit on your bootable floppy image for example, ...

To create it place a fd1440-minix.img in cdroot folder and execute:

mkisofs -o minix-boot-cd.iso -V MINIX_CD -b fd1440-minix.img -c boot.cat cdroot

[toncho11]

[ghaerr]

It appears that the emulator has taken your CD image and made it appear like a floppy at /dev/fd0. ELKS itself doesn't know anything about CDs.

You can add ro to /bootopts on a line and that will boot the root filesystem read-only; the errors shown are ELKS trying to update the MINIX filesystem to indicate the filesystem is dirty by writing the superblock (LBA 2).

If the emulator can set the CD to appear like a HDD, you might be able to use root=/dev/hda or root=/dev/hda1 in /bootopts to indicate an HDD boot.

[toncho11]

My image is using the El Torito BIOS specification for booting from CD-ROM. One of its defined modes is "floppy emulation".

The El Torito CD-ROM Boot Specification defines three boot modes in total:

• Floppy emulation
• Hard-disk emulation
• No-emulation (used by modern bootloaders like ISOLINUX/GRUB)

[toncho11]

So this method is limited to 1440 bootable CDs. The 2.88 emulation is not always supported. And it is also the only possible method on the long term.

[ghaerr]

Ok. All the more reason to get NX automatically built and copied onto 1440k floppies. I'm working on that now.

[toncho11]

I tried the above CD image of ELKS and it boots on real 2011 laptop! It felt good! I used re-writable CD. You can use the same machine you are on. It is much less cumbersome than floppy and switching computers, etc. ELKS works OK.

• El Torito CD-ROM emulation of a 2.88 floppy image is possible as a standard, but not always supported, should be tested
• El Torito CD-ROM emulation of a HDD image, should be tested as well, maybe also less supported
• the CD image we could start producing, can mount /tmp on a RAM drive, so that /tmp/nxsock and /tmp/nxjpeg.log and others are OK
• mouse support for laptops - there is none for ELKS now and I would like to test nxdsktop. You can not hook serial, PS2 or USB mouse that can be used by ELKS.
  • one possible solution is to use "network mouse" or "ethernet mouse":
    • We can use raspberry pi or esp32 with network hat. The idea is to forward the mouse connected to the raspberry pi over ethernet (or wifi) to the laptop. In the case of Raspberry pi it can be USB mouse. In the case esp32 it can be a PS2 mouse. A PS2 mouse will be easy to read on the ESP32 (no USB stack) and the mouse events send overt network to the laptop. On ELKS there will be a C code that reads these mouse events over network. Might sound a bit complicated, but it is a long term solution. Ethernet will always be available and it is fast enough for the job.
    • or simply two laptops - no need to buy a raspberry pi if you have an extra latop that can do the job
    • we could use PS2, but we need to write a /dev/psaux for ELKS ...

[rafael2k]

I think some BIOS can "expose" notebook mouse as PS2, no?

[toncho11]

Yes, which is nice, but you need to have one :)

[toncho11]

Developing /dev/psaux PS2 mouse driver will be very helpful because there are enough computers with both a bootable CD and PS2. Something between 1996 (bootable CD) and 2008 (end of PS2 port).