DSL Linux on the Omnibook 800CT - Part 3

Now we have DSL installed and X running properly we can look at customising it for the 800CT and its role as an rsync server.

First of all, the 800CT doesn't have AGP, USB, Firewire or any of that newfangled stuff. As DSL is Knoppix-derived, it does a lot of device detection and configuration on startup but we can disable these using the previously mentioned cheatcodes in /boot/grub/menu.lst.

However, we do want APM enabled and although the HDD supports UDMA this is beyond the 800CT - not surprising since the standard was actually introduced after the 800CT launched.

Finally, I want to mount /dev/hda3 on /srv for rsync to use for file storage. This means I would rather Knoppix didn't recreate /etc/fstab on bootup.

Putting this all together we now have a line in /boot/grub/menu.lst that reads:

 kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda1 quiet vga=normal nofirewire nousb 
  ... noagp noacpi nodma noscsi nofstab frugal

I know the 800CT does in fact have a built-in SCSI port which was dead cool at the time but I don't see myself using it right now.

I also need to manually mount /dev/hda3 since just putting an entry in /etc/fstab is not enough. Knoppix drive detection means that there's no mount -a in the startup process. A quick look in /etc/rc5.d shows that /opt/bootlocal.sh is where I need to add mount /dev/hda3.

Finally, for now, torsmo is the neat little utility that puts system stats on the desktop in DSL. So I update /root/.torsmorc and /home/dsl/.torsmorc to display drive stats for /srv rather than /home/dsl.