[Wylug-help] Slackware9.1/Mandrake9.2 for a linux newbie

[Nigel Metheringham]

[I've never used Mandrake, and haven't used Slackware since the days
when it came on 30 or so floppies, so won't comment on the main part of
the posting]

On Tue, 2004-04-13 at 13:36, David Noble wrote:
>  I have tried using
> DrakFloppy (Control Centre) but it fails with 'not enough space' error. It
> seems to copy the kernel but fails with initrd.img (Whatever that is)

initrd - initialisation ram disk.
Back in the early days, when men were real men etc...., you built your
kernel as a monolitic lump with compiled in support for all the hardware
you might use, and configured so it booted correctly on your particular
hardware platform.  In those days distributions came with a wide
selection of kernels - ie IDE and western digital network card support
etc...

Then came the wonder of loadable modules.  No longer did you need to
build loads of kernel types depending on the hardware being supported,
or build a single huge kernel that supported everything (except low
memory machines).

However you still needed to boot your kernel to a point where the kernel
could see the root hard drive partition and load user space from there.
Sometimes you needed modules loaded to do this (ie SCSI drivers or
particular filesystem times) - but these could not be loaded since you
could not yet see your root.

The solution was to have an initialisation package that is specially
handled - the boot loader loads a disk image into RAM at the same time
as the kernel, the kernel then treats this disk image as its root
filesystem, and the filesystem contains sufficient user space tools to
boot strap the kernel to the point where it can see the real root
filesystem.  This disk image - the initrd - needs to contain any
required modules for you to get to your root filesystem (ie SCSI or IDE
drivers, filesystems etc) and a few tools like a module loader and a
very basic shell to run this stuff.

On a RH like system (which probably includes Mandrake) there is a tool
call mkinitrd which builds the initrd to bootstrap the system.

	Nigel.

--
[ Nigel Metheringham           Nigel.Metheringham at InTechnology.co.uk ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]