Linux???? is it real

<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