From: gregw@minotaur.tansu.com.au (Greg Wilkins) Subject: SLS notebook Install experiences Date: 28 Jun 1993 04:12:36 GMT
I have just installed SLS 1.02 on a Sphere SpeedBook (33MHz 486SLC, 64 grey VGA,
4MB RAM, 120MB HDD).
Things basically went smoothish, but I had a few funnies/questions that arose:
I Initially installed the SLS a? disks and tested that it worked.
I then attempted an A,B,C,X install with prompting on -> this failed (later)
I then attempted an A,B,C,X install with no prompting and power saving features
turned off -> this also failed (later).
I then installed A,B,C and used sysinstall to install X (which I have not yet tested).
When I initially installed A, everything worked fine, power saving features included
(spin down, slow mode, sleep and suspend). However, I was installing in what used
to be my D drive, which I had used MSDOS6's fdisk to remove the logical drive, leaving
the extended partition.
PROBLEM 1 -> after booting a1, I ran the linux fdisk and saw, partion 1
(my Dos partition), partition 2 (my 74 meg extended
partition for linux) and a logical partition 5 that was
complete rubbish. I tried to delete partition 5, but
fdisk core dumped. So I ignored 5, did a mke2fs in
/dev/hda2 and installed A. Once booted, I tried the fdisk
again, It was able to delete the jibberish partition 5,
but I did not have the guts to do a 'w' to see if it would
work.
NB. The FAQ says use:
mke2fs /dev/hdXX 90000
for a 90MB partition. Stupidly I followed this literally, when it should read
mke2fs /dev/hdXX 92160
or only claim to create a file system that is 90000 blocks, not 90MB. I wonder
how many people are wasting a couple of MBs of HDD this way? (or maybe I'm the only
fool trusting enough to believe if they say 90000 they mean 90000 :-)
On the next install I deleted the extended partition from dos fdisk, then recreated
it, without a logical drive. This stopped A1s fdisk from seeing a strange
partition 5.
PROBLEM 2 -> When trying the install of A,B,C,X as I got to the last of the
C disks, things started going very very very slowly, like 30minutes
per disk. By X3 I got sick of this and thought that the power
management stuff was getting confused.
So I started again with all the power management stuff turned off.
This time I got to about X2 before it all ground to a halt.
Anyone have any ideas why this would happen? running out of
memory???
OK, so Finally I installed A,B,C -> no problems. Then I used sysinstall to
install the X disks, which worked fine.
PROBLEM 3 -> When trying to use sysinstall -remove, to get rid of unwanted packages,
I found that several of the listed packages responded with "No such
package" errors when I tried to delete them?
QUESTION I'm about to make a swap file so I can try to get the X running. The
FAQ file says that in order to swap on a file I need to use
dd -if /dev/hdxx -of /swap_file .....
to create the file before running mkswap on it. Why is this needed?
Does is just make a file of the right size (so would -if /dev/zero work)
or does mkswap use information from the first few blocks of the hdd??
NB. there appears to be no manual for mkswap in A,B,C & X. Does D have
any more manuals in it?
All and All I'm more than pleased with the whole thing (even if I dont get X working)
and have found no problems that I cant work around (if not understand) with a little reading, some common sense and a bit of trial/error.
All I ask, is now that I have installed it for the 4 time, please dont release the
next version for a few months :-)
-gregw