Installing Linux On A Pet Rock
We all love pet rocks for the all outstanding advantages they have over regular organic pets; they never die, they never run away, they don't make a mess out of whatever you have in your house. If properly taken care of, a pet rock will literally last forever.
Nevertheless, some people feel their pet rock is lacking some little indescriptible thing. Although their best mineral friend is already amazingly playful, communicative and cute, they wanted more. So we went on to install Linux on it, giving a whole new meaning to the sentence "Linux rocks!".
WARNING: sysadmins that are only experienced with dead badgers will want to have our Hypothetically Living Mineral Entities course first.
What's needed
- a well-behaved, healthy pet rock. The typical young oceanic pebble will do. Silicium-rich magma has been known to be particularly receptive, if properly cooled.
- The Mineralix distribution from EartHacker Inc.
- Linux computer with Ethernet interface (preferably 100 Mbps or more) and up to 4GB free hard drive space (depending on rock size and installation options)
- A TectoNIC SiSM-0 network adapter
- A Serial2Piezo serial cable. USB version is available but requires a specific driver.
- a pair of pliers, multi-tool if available
- duct tape
- a clean towel
- A cool, dry place and a few hours to kill.
Installation process
Deploy the towel and sit your pet rock properly. Hug it and talk to it so it feels relaxed. Explain him what will happen, why you do it, and the great benefits it will gain from the operation; a prepared rock is worth a moutain. Furthermore, rock anxiety is a common cause of boot failure.
STEP 1
An out-of-the-ground rock (no matter how cute it is) has no firmware nor RAM. The first step is to upload a firmware to make it a bootable pet rock. Select a smooth, quartz-rich surface on your rock and clean it of any dirt or organic matter. Then connect the Serial2Piezo adapter onto it, and to your PC on the other side. When powered up, the connection area on your pet rock should glow green as data is transmitted.
If your pet rock's surface is not suitable for connection, you may have to insert the probe beneath it in order to get a good signal. Drill gently, no more than necessary, and watch your pet rock closely during the operation. They never cry anyway, but you never know.
STEP 2
Select a proper firmware from the Mineralix add-on CD and upload it using the provided custom TFTP program. You may have to go through trial and error, as most rocks are a bit fuzzy about their origins, and this kind of boot failure is hard to diagnose. Most often, a sub-version of
rockware-granite-generic2 will work. Once the right firmware is loaded, your pet rock should boot properly, but it won't be noticeable unless it is a real extrovert.
STEP 3
Typical pet rocks suffer a lack of input/output capabilities, except hot magma, which requires special facilities to handle and is beyond the scope of this document. Experienced hackers will especially like the powerful
/dev/null facility of hot magma, and are encouraged to try it out if given the occasion.
In order to install Linux on regular rocks, the TectoNIC adapter is required. It detects all tectonic movements that the pet rock might emit out of pleasure, interest, interrogation or disgust, and forwards them to a local ethernet bus. This method generally works better with larger rocks, and requires smaller rocks to remain perfectly undisturbed during operation. It would be a good idea to fold the towel several times before sitting a smaller rock, in order to isolate it well.
Follow the instructions on the Mineralix manual to do a network boot of your pet rock, using the
scratch_rock image. Watch it carefully for cracks or overheating during this phase; if either occur, stop the procedure immediately and contact your local geologist. There is no known case of a pet rock that died during a Linux installation, but you never know.
STEP 4
Your pet rock should now be up and running a default lightweight kernel, but one can hardly tell it. Telnet to your rock to begin the partition process. It is highly recommended to do a bad blocks check, as most rocks (even high grade ones) present some inclusions or fossils that may hinder data integrity. This is normal. There is plenty of space, so don't be worried about that.
Lay a fairly large swap partition (remember that stock rocks don't have RAM), then split up the rest into pretty much what you want. A common partition scheme puts the most sensitive data in the core of the pet rock and /tmp at the periphery, where little bits are more likely to be chipped off.
STEP 5
Run the installation script from Mineralix. This is a well-done script written in BBASH (Boulder Bash), that will automagically install the base packages from NFS directories exported by your computer.
Note: at some point, you may receive some kernel-level messages from the TectoNIC adapter, complaining about buffer size. Mineralix provides a workaround for this, in the form of a small sack of sand included in the retail box. Locate the small oscillator on top of the TectoNIC, pry it open with a flat screwdriver, then pour the content of the sand sack into it. If you downloaded Mineralix, call TectoNIC support at 555-NETROCKS to obtain a buffer upgrade for free (save shipping charges). Do not use sand other than what was provided.
Recent rocks have vast processing capabilities. Mineralix includes the popular
greatquestion test suite that should return 42 within a few minutes if your rock is OK. It is even said that a Beowulf cluster of Linux pet rocks could compute the question itself.
This page was served by Apache 2.0.54 on petrock-1.home Mineralix 2.6.12.5-granite-0.25b