Beyond Linux From Sctrach

My last post stated I had a bootable OS now. Once bootable, I needed a network connection. I started trying to get DHCP to work, but after running into some problems, I decided to go with a fixed address, and return to DHCP later. The one thing I find annoying is not being able to cut and paste, so I decided the first thing I needed to get working was some sort of Desktop. The windowing system will be based on X, so I jumped to Xorg to try and get that working. There is a LOT to compiling X. I remember way back in the early 90ties, I download X11 and it honestly took me three days of just compiling to get it to work. Of course that was on a Sun3 system, running Sun OS. I have a faster system, but still this is going to be a lot of work. For example, this is just one section of Xorg, that has to be downloaded, compiled, and installed:

                                             
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/bigreqsproto-1.1.1.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/compositeproto-0.4.2.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/damageproto-1.2.1.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/dmxproto-2.3.1.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/dri2proto-2.6.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/fixesproto-5.0.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/fontsproto-2.1.1.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/glproto-1.4.14.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/inputproto-2.0.2.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/kbproto-1.0.5.tar.bz2
# printproto required for Java
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/printproto-1.0.5.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/randrproto-1.3.2.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/recordproto-1.14.1.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/renderproto-0.11.1.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/resourceproto-1.2.0.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/scrnsaverproto-1.2.1.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/videoproto-2.3.1.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/xcmiscproto-1.2.1.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/xextproto-7.2.0.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/xf86bigfontproto-1.2.0.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/xf86dgaproto-2.1.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/xf86driproto-2.1.1.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/xf86vidmodeproto-2.3.1.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/xineramaproto-1.2.1.tar.bz2
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/xproto-7.0.22.tar.bz2

Luckily, using wget, the downloads are made easier. And with a few short scripts, so is the compiling. More on that later. 

Finally boots

I have spent the last two days trying to get a bootable kernel. Well, it finally boots. I kept ignoring an error that was right in from of me. The error:

Cannot open root device "sda1" of unknown-block(2,0)
....

hda1
hda2
hda3
hda4

I kept trying to get the machine to recognize /dev/sda, when in fact I should have been looking for /dev/hda. I made sure the disk interface was being recognized, the filesystem was in the kernel,, and a number of other things I compiled into the kernel. I spent a lot of time running "make menuconfig" and installing  new kernels. The biggest reason I was trying to get /dev/sda recognized, was when I was working on the drive externally, Fedora was seeing it as /dev/sdb. Finally I changed my grub.cfg to look for /dev/hda and it booted. There are further problems, I have only a command line interface, but now I can move on the Beyond Linux From Scratch.