Obviously I'm not echoing the Crux handbook here. However, I will try to save you time. First of all, the Crux CD assumes you're booting from /dev/hdc. With my Armada^[4] this is incorrect. Enter at the boot prompt:

CRUX root=/dev/hdb

After this, the CD will boot and you will find yourself at the root login. Continue at section 3.2 of the Crux manual.

When the manual tells you to use fdisk to partition your hard drive, you can use the friendlier cfdisk instead. If you're going to give your /home file system a separate partition (which is a good idea), don't use more than 10 GB for the rest. A Crux system is pretty small. In fact, you'll probably get away with five or six. After all, you're going to put a large music collection on it and a few movies for those endless hours at airport terminals that don't have free wireless, aren't you?

After you inserted your USB stick into the USB port, dmesgwill tell you what device file points to it. On my Armada this was /dev/sda1. Floppies are pointed to by /dev/fd0. Windows formatted floppies and USB devices usually use vfat for a filesystem. What I had to do was:

# mkdir /mnt/usb
# mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb

Floppies can be mounted as follows:

# mkdir /mnt/floppy
# mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

After mounting, copy the .config to the kernel source directory.

# cp /mnt/<mount point>/.config /usr/src/linux-<w.x.y.z.>/

Most of the hardware of your Armada is then supported by your kernel. You will almost certainly still need to make extra choices by yourself, since there are undoubtely modules you need that I don't and vice versa. However, this configuration is a good start that will give you a working machine, unless you have one of those Pentium-II Armadas: during kernel configuration go into Processor type and features and select your processor under Processor family. My kernel configuration choices are explained the section called “Kernel configuration annotations”.

Instead of asking for a specific IP, it makes much more sense for a laptop to ask for any IP address available. The start segment of your /etc/rc.d/net should look like this, so that is backgrounds when it takes takes a few moments and that you don't get an error when it is called from /etc/rc.conf:

/sbin/dhcpcd eth0 & > /dev/null