....Excerpts of a diary....
Oh well,I finally woke up because the door bell was ringing.
I don't like being woken that early,but it was ok this time,as the mail man had my long-awaited Redhat 5.1 Linux CD's for me.
I decided to get up,as I was awake already,and started to look at the manual.
After skimming app.50 pages I decided to just start up my future 486 Linux machine,and see what happened.
Then the fun began.
I started up the 486,loaded the network and backed up a few files from it to my primary W95 machine,as I intended to use the 486 solely for Linux,and therefore the data would be wiped.
The Redhat package contained a manual,three CD's and one boot diskette,so I just decided to put in the boot diskette and reboot.
Cool,it booted the diskette in like 3 seconds and up came a nice text-based welcome message,basically just:"Hit enter to install Redhat Linux 5.1".
Ok,fine,so I did.
It continued booting the disk for like 3 seconds and then it rebooted the PC.
Huh ?
Well,just bad vibrations somewhere.
Let's try again.
It did the same.
One more time!
Same thing.
I knew I'd hate Linux.
Let's try a Scandisk on this diskette.
Hmm,it was ok.
Well,let's go login to www.redhat.com and see what might be happening.
There might be a hardware incompatibility or something.
After skimming the HW comp.lists for a while I didnt notice anything,so I went for the "errata"/updates part of the site.
Cool,there's an updated boot image,let's get that.The bug-fixes don't relate to my problem,but perhaps the disk has a bit error or something.
Ok,download the rawrite thingy and the image.
Damn slow server - 1-1.5 kB/s.
Ok,now write the image on this machine and then to boot the 486 from it.
Ok,same "hit enter to install"-prompt.Hmm,it's the same version as the one I have originally.
Let's see - "Enter" it is.
It boots! Yeah.... erm,nope.It boots for app.half a second longer than the original disk...
F*ck this crap.
Next thing:IRC.
There might be some gurus there who can help me,if they're not all occupied with their usual lame pastime of nuking Windoze users.
[extracts from IRCNET and EFNET]
Sorry,I use Slackware...
...New channel...
<silence>
...New channel...
No idea,m8...
...New channel...
<silence>
...New channel...
You should partition your disk like this..(erm,when I cant boot that aint possible.)
Use the utilities in the /dosutils directory..
Umm,that may be an idea.
What f*cking utils ?
Let's see,there's an "autoboot.bat",let's look at that.
"loadlin autoboot\vmlinuz initrd=autoboot\initrd.img"
Well,let's try to run it.
Loading Linux...
blablabla...
Yes!
Now there's an nice window with buttons and stuff.
Fine.
Hmm,my mouse don't work.
Ok,I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and the PC reboots.
[Screen]
c:\mouse <enter>
e:
cd \dosutils
Autoboot
And it boots up ?
Nope,it just fills the screen with a lot a text which scrolls up before anybody with more than a 4004 could read it.
Let's try again.
More text.
Reboot.
Load mouse.
Start autoboot.bat
Hmm,if it was DOS I'd suppose it was out of conventional memory.
Maybe Linux also does that somehow.
Ok,another reboot,and let's just try without the mousedriver again.
...autoboot.bat<ENTER>
Well,this time it worked.
Blah.
Now to actually INSTALL the sucker.
What moron said that installing Linux would only take 15 minutes ?
Now I've spent 2 hours starting the INSTALL PROGRAM!