Setting Up Linux on Toshiba Mini NB205

I am setting up Linux on my Toshiba Mini NB205. If you use a user-friendly Linux distro, such as Pardus Linux, difficult tasks like driver installation and X.org setup are easily done with the help of Linux installer. However, I found it hard to set up my Debian system on Toshiba NB205 which I had previously run from my USB flash drive.

Running pcimodules

I booted my Linux BootCD with kernel 2.6.25.15 and issued the command “pcimodules”

r8169
i2c-i801
ahci
ata_generic
ata_piix
pata_acpi
intel-rng
iTCO-wdt
ehci-hcd
uhci-hcd
snd-hda-intel
intel-agp

With Linux kernel 2.6.18.8, pcimodules displayed the following results:

snd-hda-intel
uhci-hcd
ehci-hcd
intel-rng
generic
piix
ahci
i2c-i801

Creating initrd Image

Based on this information, I created a folder containing the following files:

bin/dash
bin/mount
etc/modprobe.d
lib/ld-linux.so.2
lib/libblkid.so.1
lib/libc.so.6
lib/libdevmapper.so.1.02.1
lib/libdl.so.2
lib/libpthread.so.0
lib/libselinux.so.1
lib/libsepol.so.1
lib/libuuid.so.1
lib/modules/2.6.18.8/kernel/drivers/ide/ide-disk.ko
lib/modules/2.6.18.8/kernel/drivers/ide/pci/piix.ko
lib/modules/2.6.18.8/kernel/drivers/scsi/ahci.ko
lib/modules/2.6.18.8/kernel/drivers/scsi/libata.ko
lib/modules/2.6.18.8/kernel/drivers/scsi/scsi_mod.ko
lib/modules/2.6.18.8/kernel/drivers/scsi/sd_mod.ko
lib/modules/2.6.18.8/kernel/fs/jfs/jfs.ko
lib/modules/2.6.18.8/kernel/fs/nls/nls_base.ko
lib/modules/2.6.18.8/kernel/fs/nls/nls_utf8.ko
lib/modules/2.6.18.8/modules.dep
sbin/modprobe
sbin/pivot_root
usr/sbin/chroot

Then, inside this folder, I created etc folder and saved a file called init with the following contents.

#!/bin/dash
modprobe piix &&
modprobe ide-disk &&
modprobe ahci &&
modprobe sd_mod &&
mount -n -t jfs -o ro,iocharset=utf8 /dev/sda1 /mnt
cd /mnt
pivot_root . initrd
exec chroot . /sbin/init 5 dev/console 2>&1

Then, I ran the following commands inside the folder:

mkdir dev mnt tmp
cd dev; MAKEDEV std hda sda consoleonly

I created a cramfs image of this folder. Now I could boot into Linux with the following GRUB commands:

kernel (hd0,5)/26188.bin vga=0x314 video=vesa:mtrr
initrd (hd0,5)/initrd.bin

I succeeded in booting into Linux