From: Iain.Lea@anl433.uucp Subject: A little linux xmas success story Date: Sat, 12 Dec 1992 17:02:02 GMT
The season of goodwill is almost upon us so I thought I would share a
little something to warm your hearts (sure as hell beats the recent
linux vs. 386bsd BS).
I had booked my 3 week xmas break a couple of months ago to avoid any
problems with co-workers and project schedules. All was going well
until my boss told me that he was thinking of cancelling the first
week of my holiday as certain people needed extra help (and I was the
help that he wanted to give :-(). We discussed the problem and decided
that most of the work could be done off-line (from the target system)
and he arranged a 386SX/2MB/60MB notebook for me over the xmas period.
Initial reaction was neat. This was closely followed by (Oh noo!!)
realization that dos&windows was installed which was not going to
help me much as the project was being developed on ISC Unix.
I quickly realized that I was going to have to install ISC Unix from
floppies and pronto as today (friday) was my last workday. So off I
went to the datasafe to get the original disks only to find they had
been checked out by a fellow in another department (sigh). I tracked
him down only to be told "Not a chance mate (said in German) I need
all the disks for the install" to which I answered "Oh does the the
floppy drive hold all the disks at once?". The biggest problem with
Germans is they just don't pick up on sarcastic undertones even when
said to them in German.
Anyway getting back to the thread of this small (?) story. I had about
six hours left to install something more useful than dos or the sinking
feeling that I would have to work another week. A co-worker suggested I
try installing Xenix as it would probably install on such a small box.
Checked out the Xenix disks and started installing them. Installed the
base and dev. kit without too many problems. Loaded up my apps. source
and typed make. SPLAT!! said the C compiler. The error messages were
sure as hell enlightening NOT!. I started sifting through a compiler
run to find out the problems (had compiled fine on ISC & SunOS with cc
and gcc) and even dug into the manuals!. After 3 hours it was a no-go.
Back to square one with one pissed off progammer slowly turning the
air blue.
Just when I thought "Its friday & time is tight (as usual)" an old
friend dropped by our department for an informal visit. He looked
at the problem, thought all of 5 seconds, opened his case and got
a box of disks out and said "this is linux - take it & call me in
the morning". With that he left and I thought "what the hell, I'll
give it go". The version he had left me was 0.98Pl1-37 & the SLS.
I put the boot a1 in the disk and reset to be quickly greeted by
linux booting from floopy. Everything went fine and I read the
/user/README file a couple of times after inserting the a2 disk.
I used fdisk to make a 60MB linux/minix (type 81) partition. Reset
the computer and waited... and waited... and waited (snorr-snorr)...
I eventually decided to boot with a dos floppy and use the dos
fdisk to look at the partition info. I immediately noticed that
the linux partition was not active (haha! I thought). I quickly
set it active and reset the notebook. Still would not boot (Hmm...)
After a lot of thought and a warm fuzzy feeling at the front of my
head I realized a few things:
o An active partition is there (as reported by dos & linux before reset)
o The partition uses all the disk leaving zero space for the swap area (gulp)
o Linux will not boot from a normal a2 utilities disk (it was late!)
I rebooted with the a1 boot disk, created 55MB primary partition (type 81),
a 5M swap partition (type 82), rebooted & put the a1 boot disk back in.
When I tried to mkfs /dev/hda1 it churned away for a few seconds and then
core dumped. I had heard that linux would install with only 2MB of Ram but
I now had doubts. Anyway I nobbled another 2MB from a friends notebook
(probably now an ex-friend - sorry Uwe) and installed it.
With the 4MB installed I mkfs'ed /dev/hda1, mkswap'ed /dev/hda2 and entered
'doinstall /dev/hda1'. From there on it was pretty much 'rock & roll' and I
installed everything except X11 within a short time. The install program was
pretty smooth after my initial problems.
I loaded my apps. source and typed make. I got a stream of errors from gcc
about "linux/types.h not found" or something like that. On further snooping
I found /linux/include/linux (strange place?) and added -I/linux/include to
the CFLAGS define in my Makefile. After that everything went smoothly until
I tried to compile a yacc file. Bison blew up & was pretty secretive about
why. I eventually ftp'ed a fresh copy from our internal archive and compiled
it. With that everything compiled OK and I now have a working system.
My initial impressions, conclusions or whatever you want to call them follow:
o /user/README did not *explicitly* state that I had to put the a1 boot
disk back in when I reset the computer after making a linux partition.
o It does not *explicitly* state that one has to make a swap area. Both
this and the above point could do with better documentation.
o Linux may well *run* in 2MB of ram but I needed 4MB to *install* it.
o Bison 1.18 that came with the SLS was broken/corrupted.
o Top dumps after running for a few minutes with 'lseek 402...' error.
I am now one happy camper & my co-workers can't believe that I have Unix
installed on such a small notebook. I expect a small queue of people to
be visiting me in January asking me for help in installing Linux.
Iain