Re: iso image

On Tue, 2 Oct 2007, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux, in article
<4702a413$0$14864$bbae4d71@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Bill Cunningham wrote:

[Note: 'comp.os.linux' is a placeholder for the comp.os.linux.* news
group hierarchy, and isn't carried on that many news servers. Try
posting to comp.os.linux.setup.]

I have an ancient linux that I want to run on a modern linux host.

You're going to have to re-phrase that statement so that people can
understand what you are asking. 'Linux' is an operating system, not
an application, and I suspect you really want to run some ancient
application rather than booting the ISO into the ancient distribution.

It's an old Caldera with a 2.2 kernel.

Probably Caldera 2.2 through 2.4 (from 1999/2000). They were glibc-2.1
distributions, (similar to Red Hat 6.x where are of the same vintage),
so you're probably going to see a lot of compatibility issues.

I want to change the directory to an iso image and mount some device
to operate it.

11102 Aug 29 2003 Loopback-Encrypted-Filesystem-HOWTO
26830 Apr 26 2001 Loopback-Root-FS

Unfortunately, both of those HOWTOs were withdrawn some years ago. I
can see them on ibiblio.org in French, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, and
Chinese translations... and in linuxdoc (sgml) format... and there
it is in html:

../docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html:
-rw-rw-r-- 1 gferg ldp 5466 Aug 29 2003
Loopback-Encrypted-Filesystem-HOWTO-html.tar.gz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 gferg ldp 9980 Apr 26 2001
Loopback-Root-FS-html.tar.gz

I _think_ that's what you may need. So, use an anonymous FTP to
ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html/ which is
where these files were hiding ten days ago.

Does anyone know the major and minor numbers of anything I need to
create with mknod to mount this linux on my RH linux host?

7 block Loopback devices
0 = /dev/loop0 First loop device
1 = /dev/loop1 Second loop device
...

The loop devices are used to mount filesystems not
associated with block devices. The binding to the
loop devices is handled by mount(8) or losetup(8).

This system (and four others I have immediate access to) have /dev/loop0
through /dev/loop7 (7:0 thru 7:7) already.

Old guy
.