by I know you're not going to believe this, but it's here!
About a month after I hoped to have it out, the MCC interim
release of Linux 0.96c is available. I still need to do a
little work on the README's, but most of the things are there
waiting to be transferred!
For those who don't know, the MCC interim releases of Linux
are designed to make installing Linux easy. Get copies of the
README files, together with the five disk images, uncompress
where necessary (only the boot disk compresses this time, I'm
afraid), rawrite to high density disks of any size, and you're
away. Problems might occur if you have only 2mb of memory, but
I successfully installed Linux on a 2mb machine yesterday using
these disks, so I know what I'm talking about.
What do you get? Besides what is usually on the root disks --
we don't use separate root disks at MCC! -- you get all of the
usual GNU utilities, plus file, man, man pages (YES!), GCC, G++,
kermit, shoelace, groff, ... Words fail me, but you can read all
about it in the README file!
several new features: man with man pages (preformatted, but with source
available), bison (which I forgot last time), file, fdformat, and
groff. A new version of fdisk (0.93) displays sizes by cylinder
in addition to by sector (indeed, cylinder is now the default), and
lets you specify end-of-partition as a size in cylinders, kilobytes,
or megabytes; it also should handle disks with more than 1024 cylinders
more sensibly. Of course it still creates extended partitions better
than any other fdisk, but if you have SCSI drives this won't interest
you yet. If you already have Linux installed, this MCC release will
delete only the bits it replaces, unless you ask it to delete everything,
and saves your old configuration files from /etc (renaming, for example,
/etc/passwd to /etc/passwd.old, /etc/rc to /etc/rc.old, /etc/mtools to
/etc/mtools.old) and from the root, bin, and user login directories.
After you install, or if you reboot using the boot/utility pair as a
recovery system, the editors 'vi' and 'joe' now work, as well as the
'man' command. And if you wish, after a single 'ln -s /root/etc/mtools
/etc' you can run mtools! A list of Acknowledgements tries to name
all the sources of software, but doesn't mention how grateful I am
to Linus, Ted Ts'o, and H J Lu, particulary Ted, who helped me find a
bug in the ramdisk code at the last minute before going on vacation.
(as requested by several people) because the data-base-builder doesn't
work, or ldd, which will probably be coming out in a new version soon,
or a few other requests. One bit of groff -- the PostScript utilities --
wouldn't fit on the five disks, and is provided as a compressed tar file.
There are bugs in stty, in decode, and with serial connections. There
are a lot of things I wanted to add but couldn't get -- like a working
'script' -- or couldn't squeeze in.
The installation can be regarded as a group of 'packages' with the following
sizes (in kilobytes):
size disk package
2373 util main install
1829 comp1 GCC 2.2.2 binaries and include files
576 comp2 GCC 2.2.2 main libraries
75 comp1 GCC 2.2.2 libcurses.a and libdbm.a
2198 comp3 G++ 2.2.2 everything
976 comp2 main groff utilities
133 comp2 groff's DVI utilities
140 comp3 groff's bibliographical utilities
251 comp2 Kermit
107 comp2 shoelace (but you can delete 58 of this after installing)
5658 --- total (but you can delete 58 after installing shoelace)
You don't need the comp3 disk unless you want g++ or the utilities
gindxbib, glookbib, grefer, or lkbib; with just the other 4 you can
recompile the kernel and all of the stuff on the disks except groff.
(Note that the source and all patches is available for anonymous ftp,
but that source does not come on the 5 disks.)
I am very sorry for the length of time this took, but I have been
very busy lately, and only free to work on Linux on weekends and
early in the morning. Please feel free to send me comments and
suggestions, and (especially) bug fixes.
I shall post the main README file later.
-- Owen