Here are some goofy things that can make using Linux a little easier.
It takes 5 extra seconds to boot Linux from a floppy than from the HD and it gives me more of a sense of control that stupid Windows won't screw up my boot partition if I put LILO on it too, so I boot from floppy.
This is most easily done by just copying the kernel to a floppy ala:
% dd if=/vmlinuz of=/dev/fd0
Of course, its a bit harder to configure things on the fly without something like LILO. So, here is how I do it. I culled most of this from an old HOWTO that doesn't seem nearly as useful now.
Setup /etc/lilo.conf as usual, but you'll be specifying some things directly to lilo, so you don't need to specify boot location. Mine looks like:
# LILO configuration file # generated by 'liloconfig' # # Start LILO global section #boot = /dev/fd0 #compact # faster, but won't work on all systems. delay = 50 vga = normal # force sane state #ramdisk = 0 # paranoia setting # End LILO global section # Linux bootable partition config begins image = /fd/vmlinuz append = "mem=96M" root = /dev/hdb2 label = linux # Linux bootable partition config ends image = /fd/vmlinuz.ramdisk root = /dev/hdb2 label = ramlinux append = "ramdisk_size=4096"
Now you need to setup a filesystem on a floppy disk by doing:
% mke2fs /dev/fd0
Mount it and create the /boot directory
% mkdir /fd % mount /dev/fd0 /fd % mkdir /fd/boot % umount /fd
Finally, use this script to create the bootdisk:
#!/bin/sh # # Make a LILO bootable floppy with /boot on the floppy. # # Copied directly from the LILO documentation # # Oct. 14 1996 rcrit mount /dev/fd0 /fd cp /boot/boot.b /fd cp /boot/vmlinuz.* /fd cp /boot/vmlinuz /fd /sbin/lilo -C /etc/lilo.conf -b /dev/fd0 -i /fd/boot.b -c -m /fd/map umount /fd