<1. 386 or 486 box with AMI (American Megatrends) BIOS. I've had some
Exactly a AMI 386 is what I have.
<2. RAM is relatively unimportant BUT if you do not have more than 4 me
<you will need to go through a procedure to turn on your swap space BEFO
<running the install or it will crash and die.
8meg of ram
<3. Do NOT try doing the Linux running out of an MS-DOS directory on yo
<first install. I've NEVER done this nor do I suspect it's that pleasan
Not being done.
<4. Use IDE hard drives until you know enough about doing installs. Th
<you can use SCSI more effectively.
I was given today a 420meg IDE drive to replace the EDSI unit I had.
<5. If your BIOS can deal with the drive, Linux can too...with CERTAIN
<exceptions...on some BIOSs you're given the choice of using Normal, Lar
<or LBA for block addressing. Sometimes you have to try different
<settings to get a Linux install to go. Linux may complain if it thinks
<the drive has more than 1024 cylinders but the complaint can,
<essentially, be ignored these days. This is experience speaking.
826/16/63 vanilla even to dos!
<6. Be prepared to turn off caches...internal and external in the BIOS.
<Sometimes, especially on newer kernels like Slackware 3.0, you can't ge
<the boot floppy to go because it'll crash out and give you stack dump
<type information. Try turning off first the external cache and then th
<internal cache if that doesn't work. Not all caches are created equal
I'm not getting stackdumps. I'm getting all mannor of boot errors
related to the filesystem mountability or RW/RO status.
<7. Create TWO partitions with fdisk...the sequence looks like this...
I have one bootable 389mb linux and the other 16mb swap.
<8. If it's formatting the partitions and freaks out complaining that i
<can't write inodes or superblocks and gives you a long list of these
<complaints...and you have a drive over 2 gigs in size try creating 3
<partitions...the first two of equal size totalling most of the drive an
<the last being your swap. Or try a different block addressibility type
<in the BIOS.
Not a problem I get fully through the setup.
<9. There are usually different boot disk types...IDE only, IDE/SCSI,
<SCSI only. Make sure you use the IDE only. It's the easiest.
IDE is all I have other than floppy.
<10. If you want to install off cdrom and the install won't recognize t
<drive...wait for the boot prompt when you boot up and type install
<hdX=cdrom where X is a,b,c or d which correspond to what you're used to
<as Drive C:, D:, E: or F: If it's an IDE-ATAPI type CD-ROM, it should
CDrom is not installed, if it were it's a phillips cm205 (unsupported)
and not IDE-atapi. the CDrom is in another box (486powered) and the
floppies were made from there.
<Finally, if someone REALLY REALLY wants to load Linux on a system and i
<willing to follow my instructions, be patient with me, realize that I
<have a family to support and will send me some trinket in return (S-100
<cards, Shugart SA-400 drives, etc all work) AND are willing to call ME
<long-distance I can probably help you out. Email is probably easier.
Humm sa400? I may have one in the pile fairly unused.
The problem is nothing works as advertized for a vanilla install.
This box is as vanilla as they come.
AMI 386DX/33, 128k cache, 8mb ram, connor 420mb IDE, 3.5" 1.44 floppy,
serial mouse on com1: modem at com2:, DECPA(DE100) NI, TRIDENT 512k
SVGA. Runs dos/win3.1 real well(just to prove the hardware works).
It's taken a year to scrounge up all the parts to create this system.
Allison
Received on Sun Jan 04 1998 - 22:39:53 GMT