BasicLinux 3.5 on i386 with SCSI

BasicLinux is a super-stripped-down Linux distribution designed for particualrly ancient machines. The posted system requirements are a 386 or better with a mere 3MB of RAM (though 12 is recommended). The system appears to be based on Slackware 4.0, and can install most Slackware 4.0 packages.

Network

The script /root/netsetup can be modified to suit your hardware, then executed to install the selected drivers, and assign the configured addresses.

So far my Netgear EA201 NE2000-compatible card will not work, despite the driver locating the card and it appearing in ifconfig -a. Something crashes when assigning an IP address.

Hardware

You need to manually load kernel modules for your devices. For example:

1 insmod ide-cd

AHA-1542 (SCSI)

You need to load the SCSI subsystem, the SCSI device drivers you plan to use, and then the AHA-1542 driver itself:

1
2
3 insmod sd_mod   # else sr_mod for cdrom, st for tape, sg for generic
insmod scsi_mod
insmod aha1542 ah1542=0x230,11,7 # params are IO,IRQ,DMA