OK, so I backed up the system restore partition on my Acer Aspire netbook, and ran sudo debootstrap --arch=i386 stable /mnt/sda1 http://deb.debian.org/debian/ to load the latest Debian stable image on it.
but, again, LILO can't seem to handle the block major device 117 which coLinux uses for its cobd virtual drives, or rather coLinux's module doesn't implement EVMS properly. so I'm trying with extlinux instead. my first few tries at an extlinux.conf files gave an informative message Boot error, so this last time I used the full path to the kernel instead, and used the keyword LINUX instead of KERNEL, and instead of that error message it just sits there with a blinking cursor. progress? maybe.
it's funny that each time I run extlinux --update /boot/extlinux the number loaded into the EAX register in the disassembly of the bootblock increases. in the very first installation, it was mov $0x1244000,%eax, and now it's up to mov $0x127c000,%eax. I haven't yet analyzed the code sufficiently to understand what it's really doing.
last updated 2018-02-12 17:38:31. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com