Pbs installing Sybex/Linux on laptop

Pbs installing Sybex/Linux on laptop

Post by Bryan Bro » Sun, 28 Jan 1996 04:00:00



I'm having problems getting Linux installed on my laptop. A somewhat
long-winded (but detailed) list of my installation process follows:

I purchased the Sybex book "The Complete LINUX Kit', which comes with a
release of Slackware Linux on a single CD-ROM, intending to install the
basic system (no X) onto the DOS partition on the following laptop system:

Librex 386SX/20 laptop w/ Intel 387 coprocessor
8 MB ram
80 MB hd (73 MB available after removing Windows 3.1 and apps...yeah!)
external floppy disk drive

Following the instructions in the book, I built the install boot disk and
the install root disk from the disk images on the CD (connected to the
laptop with a Trantor MiniSCSI-II parallel port adapter), and copied the
disks A1-A4 and AP1-AP5 from the CD to the hard disk in directory
SLAKWARE.

I then proceeded to install those basic Linux packages from the hard disk:

(1) booted from the install boot disk - booted fine, then it asked for the
    install root disk, as expected.
(2) inserted the root disk, and got to the Slakware login prompt fine.
(3) logged in as root, as instructed in the book, and entered setup.
(4) chose Target from the menu to select the target disk.
(5) got a single partition listed, as expected, namely the DOS partition.
(6) chose <ok>

At this point I got the following status message on the screen:

  UMSDOS Beta 0.6 (compatibility level 0.4, fast msdos)

and the system just sits there, seemingly forever (at least 30 minutes),
with *very* occasional hard disk activity.

Sooooo, being the impatient sort, I rebooted, deleted the LINUX directory
just created on the hard disk, and repeated the above procedure up to step
(4).  The book says I can bypass choosing the target partition since I
have only one, so I repeated steps (1) to (3) above, and began the
following replacement procedure at step (4):

(4) chose "select source media", then "install from the target DOS partition"
(5) when prompted for the directory from which to install, I entered <cr>
(6) chose "continue" to go to choose which disk sets to install, and
    selected the A and AP disk sets.
(7) chose normal prompting mode, i.e., use default tagfiles
(8) got a message that only stayed on the screen about 1 second, saying
    "can't run pkgtool until you've mounted your Linux partition beneath
     /mnt.  Here are wome examples of this:" , followed by 2 examples of
     using a hard disk as the root and user partitions.  (Used <ctrl>+s to
     pause the rapid scroll so I could read that message.)

Sooooo, what did I do wrong?  What do I do now to get packages A and AP
installed, and a proper boot disk built?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks

Bryan

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Pbs installing Sybex/Linux on laptop

Post by Bryan Bro » Tue, 30 Jan 1996 04:00:00


: I'm having problems getting Linux installed on my laptop. A somewhat
: long-winded (but detailed) list of my installation process follows:

<mega-snip>

Weeeellllll, I've solved these problems, rather simply (in retrospect), by
mounting the MSDOS filesystem manually *before* running the setup.  The
Sybex book makes no mention of this, but it works, and I now have a
working boot floppy and can also boot directly from the MSDOS prompt using
a batch file that invokes loadlin directly.  The command I had to enter
manually *before* starting the setup program is (and this should come as
no surprise to the more experienced users)

    mount /dev/hda1 -t umsdos /mnt

Anyway, I'm well on my way to successful installations of my favorite
packages (networking, compilers, tcl, ...).  Now if I just had more hard
disk space and screen driver for loading X.  <sigh> Next project:
configuring the ppp tools so I can use my ppp account.

Bottom line:  while the Sybex book is fairly good about walking the newbie
through an installation onto an MSDOS partition, the author left out one
cricial point before starting setup.

Bryan

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