4 Jan
1998
4 Jan
'98
1:39 p.m.
<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
4 Jan
4 Jan
10:15 a.m.
<1. 386 or 486 box with AMI (American Megatrends)
BIOS. I've had some
Exactly a AMI 386 is what I have.
Shrugs, and good to see you do have that 128k
cache. What about
387?
<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
Not bad!
snip snip snip!
I'm not getting stackdumps. I'm getting all
mannor of boot errors
related to the filesystem mountability or RW/RO status.
Looks like something on
your hd subsystem not being configured right.
Especially jumpers? That is why I demand manuals to go with 'em if
the price is expensive on rare or hard to get used parts.
My advice: Motherboards, some cards always get the manuals, because
usually once in a while caught mistakes there by former users. If
not, deal is dead.
Snip snip...!
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.
I think linux supports this one, CM 206? Cheaper to dig up both
panasonic 2x with it's controller card or the mitsumi 1x or 2x with
controller. I've of both done successfully.
Snip!
Humm sa400? I may have one in the pile fairly unused.
Ouch... :)
The problem is nothing works as advertized for a
vanilla install.
Hee hee... I have always get problems and we always figure out or
fix
all the problems. Successful on first cut is rare unless one
collects all the hardware that met the listed requirements and know
the all the dma, i/o and irq addresses with careful planning of all
things to prevent conflicts.
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).
The chipset #
of this Trident? It's supported btw but not exactly
barn-burner frame buffer performance. Tseng ET4k chips also
supported but very fast unless X acceleration then you would want
one that has ET4k/w32i if you're still on ISA bus.
It's taken a year to scrounge up all the parts to
create this system.
Wow! Suggest: net queries on individual or some parts in batch
will
make things go faster and inexpensively.
Allison
3:08 p.m.
<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.
Not a problem I get fully through the setup.
Ok, at some point it wants to do a LILO install...LILO is the boot
loader. Where are you having it put the boot loader? Even though it's a
pain if you ever want to reformat the drive for MS-DOS, I usually put the
boot loader in the MBR (Master Boot Record).
But this would cause it not to boot at all...not to fail when it tries to
moutn the drive. What it will do is see the drive as a piece of
hardware, then it will mount it read only and do an fsck (file system
check), then it will mount it read write.
You'll see the following messages or something like them interspersed
with other messages:
date something kernel: hda: Manufacturer, Size & Cache,
CHS=cyl/heads/sectors, MaxMult=something
then
date something kernel: partition check:
date something kernel: hda: hda1 hda2
date something kernel: VFS: mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
date something kernel: Adding Swap: 16000K swap-space (maybe a diff number)
and then some other messages talking about fsck etc etc...
and then it'll finally mount it read-write...
Can you tell me exactly what the error messages are? I know it's a pain
because it scrolls by kinda quick but I need to know exactly what it's
saying to give you a good idea what's going on and why.
One thing I could do...I'd have to clean some personal stuff off it...is
send you a little 40 meg drive that has Slackware 2.0 on it that I really
don't use much anymore. If it'll boot that then it's not your
hardware...it's either the formatting of the hard drive or the drive
itself. Sometimes just because they'll do MS-DOS ok doesn't mean they'll
do linux ok. It's rare but it happens.
Send me a private email if you want to do this. I've left this public
because I thought it might be of use to others.
Yeah yeah I know it's linux not cp/m blah blah blah. Except that one of
the coolest things to do with Linux is to run emulators for other
machines. I've got a whole bunch on my website at
http://www.retrocomputing.com/software.html. And I'm working on getting
Douglas Jones' PDP-8 emulator to work so that'll work on Linux soon too.
Anthony Clifton - Wirehead
5 Jan
5 Jan
9:03 a.m.
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10:21 a.m.
When I tried Linux for the first time, I got all sorts
of strange
problems - fdisk would ignore the keyboard - sometimes, I'd get odd
output, etc. It turned out (after a lot of looking at schematics, then at
the logic analyser, then at the schematic again) that my memory board had
a subtle timing problem (caused, in part, by the fact that it was a
2-sided board with no ground plane, and the ground was bouncing all over
the place). MS-DOS programs (even ones that used extended memory) never
noticed this. Memory diagnostics, left running overnight, never found it.
But Linux did. So check your memory...
Also, Linux sometimes uses hardware in ways that MS-DOS doesn't. I've had
a cheap clone keyboard fail to work with Linux as it didn't correctly
implement a couple of the commands in the IBM Techref. I doubt this is
the problem, thought.
-tony
See? Many generics unless it's decent ones for a generics is not
worth the trouble most of time. I wonder if you could just make
another memory board with fewer memory chips to keep things shorter
and compact? Good ones I would think of is 256K x 16bit DRAM's,
still available for about 7 cdn each. And downright quick at 70 to
60ns.
Jason D.
9678
days inactive
9679
days old
4 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
-
allisonp＠world.std.com -
ard＠p850ug1.demon.co.uk -
jpero＠cgo.wave.ca -
wirehead＠retrocomputing.com