From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds) Subject: Re: Beginners problems Date: 29 Aug 1992 19:55:11 GMT
In article <1564@lysator.liu.se> lien@lysator.liu.se (Jan Lien) writes:
>Problems encountered with Linux 0.97 - help appreciated.
>I have succesfully booted Linux on my pc, root system on hard drive.
>However there are some serious problems, here listed in order of
>percieved severity.
>
>- mtools does not recognize my G: and H: ms-dos logical drives on my
> extended partition. I get the error ENOENT for these disks, but
> they are in the proper table, as I can use C-D-E-F disks. Fdisk
> finds them as hda9 and hda10.
> Is this an built in constraint in Linux? I got error messages when
> I tried to use hda10 for a linux disk.
This is probably a limit in the rootdisks - I think the /dev/hdaX
entries only go as far as /dev/hda8. The fix is very simple: just
create the needed special files with mknod:
# mknod /dev/hda9 b 3 9
# mknod /dev/hda10 b 3 10
etc. By doing a "ls -l /dev/hd*" you see the device numbers, and the
setup should be pretty obvious when reading them.
>- emacs over a serial port (/dev/ttys1 or /dev/ttys2) writes in the
> mode line. Is there an error in termcap (vt100 terminal), or is
> the number of lines set incorrectly? If it is number of lines,
> where (and how) do I change them?
The problem is the default number of rows that linux uses: I have
stupidly set the value to 25 instead of the normal 24 for a vt100
terminal. The fix should once more be very simple: do a
# stty rows 24 columns 80
or
# eval `resize`
on the line before staring up.
>- where do I find information on what all the options to a command
> does? (I can find out that there are -abcdefgh... to a command,
> but what do they do?)
The man-pages for most GNU things are in the sources - for some binaries
(like fsck) no man page is available, and you have to read the actual
source files.
>- while logged in on a serial port (/dev/ttys1 or /dev/ttys2) and
> doing a cat or cp to /dev/tty, if I repeatedly press ctrl-C
> I get logged out.
This is usually a mark of a bad compile of the shell, but I haven't seen
it (but I use my own port of most relatively simple things). Don't know
of any simple fix.
Linus