From: hamdy@rzdspc22.informatik.uni-hamburg.de (Safuat Hamdy) Subject: five nice little questions (not urgent, but would be nice to get some answers) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1993 15:42:45 GMT
Dear Linux community, wizards and wizards in spe,
I have some questions which are neither critical nor urgent, but i would like
to know some things. I'm sorry if one of this questions appeared formerly in
this group or in the brand newest FAQ since I don't want to force the fellow
news-readers to wade through masses of text more than they already do, but I
have still some serious jobs to do, other than reading news all day.
Please be patient. But now:
1) In "Essential System Administration", AE. Frisch, O'Reilly, the
description of SYS V's init and it's runlevels does not match what LINUX'
init (from which it is said to be SYS V like) tells me. E.g. under LINUX'
init the runlevel for normal usage is 6. But in EssSysAdm you find
runlevel 6 described to be for immediate rebooting, and so on.
Could someone explain it (and perhaps give a complete explanation of each
LINUX' init's runlevels) ?
It would be nice if one of the wizards could write a man-page for init
and inittab, unless this has already been done of course.
2) Does someone have a report about all available filesystems with some
comparing comments about reliability, speed, pros, cons, special faetures
etc.? Where? I think this is something to add in the FAQ (unless this has
already been done, I haven't the newest, excuse me).
3) Monthes ago, there was a little discussion about memory above the 16MB
limit on the ISA-bus architecture. Someone told that it would be better
to give the system all memory (32MB on my box, with AHA 1542B) than to
create a ram-disk on the upper 16MB or to use them as a swap-device on
the upper 16MB.
I recompiled the kernel as described (0.99-pl4 --- not the newest but
STABLE!) ... it was really nice to see "free"'s output, and everything
ran whitout any trouble, as used before except ... hmmmm ... I found
everything running 3-5 times slower!!! (<-- this is really true, and it
is more than "slightly less" performance!) This is not acceptable, so
I returned to the idea of a swap-device or something like this.
Question: Either does any solution in this direction exist? (Where? How?)
or should I retry the same with a newer kernel release? (Linus or one
of the kernel-wizards might know a good answer :-) but be aware: SCSI !)
4) There were many messages about LILO working together with this-and-that-OS
but I never read something about LILO working together with an SCSI-
adapter. Could someone reliably tell me if it is possible to use the OS/2
boot-manager so that it calls LILO from the menu choice ON AN AHA-1542B ?
===============
I mean, I would like to install LILO on my HD, but only in such a way that
I need not to fetch all install-disks for all software that was formerly
on HD.
5) Where to get Xview with a nice little installation-script, all neccessary
include-files & libs, man-pages, and perhaps some utilities?
Thanks in advance
S. Hamdy
hamdy@rzdspc1.informatik.uni-hamburg.de