Similar issue (Was: [ale] linux on a 486)

[Jeff Hubbs]

I'm in the process of trying to do a very similar thing - put Slackware 8.0
on a 486 with 20MB RAM.  I'm setting up this machine for a home-school
teacher who will be starting some kids in first grade in the fall.

I got to the point where it was asking me for IP addresses and the name of
the NFS export, only to die miserably.  It occurred to me that although it
asked me for network setup information, at no time did it ask me what kind
of NIC I had nor did it give any impression that it had as much as attempted
to autodetect one.  I noticed that the corresponsing link light on my
Ethernet switch was not lit.

The various READMEs led me to believe that I needed the bare.i and the
network.dsk floppies.  Upon reading the README for the network.dsk image,
though, it said I needed the colors.gz rootdisk, and so I first powered up
with the bare.i floppy and put in the colors.gz floppy when asked for a
rootdisk.  At no time, though, did anything ask for the network.dsk floppy.

Can anyone tell me where my procedure went awry?

- Jeff


What's kind of funny to me about all this is that slack was the first distro
I ever installed, back in 1995 - just me and a big stack of floppies!

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael H. Warfield [mailto:mhw at wittsend.com]
> Sent: Monday, August 06, 2001 10:01 AM
> To: Wandered Inn
> Cc: ALE
> Subject: Re: [ale] linux on a 486
> 
> 
> On Mon, Aug 06, 2001 at 09:21:07AM -0400, Wandered Inn wrote:
> > Trey Darley wrote:
> > > 
> > > Dude. He just got done saying he TRIED Slackware. Better grab that
> > > second cup of coffee. ;-)
> 
> > Yeah, true.  What I tried to do was to add enough swap to 
> compensate for
> > the lack of memory.  I'm going through the same process 
> again, this time
> > adding an even larger swap.  It appears that my last 
> failure could have
> > been attributed to problems with the network card though.  When I
> > attempted to setup my nfs network connection, I received 
> errors.  I shut
> > the box down, tried to reseat the nic, rebooted and I'm 
> cooking again.
> 
> 	OH!  $#@$#@$#@!!!
> 
> 	I totally forgot about that weird problem when I did a Slackware
> install on those two laptops.
> 
> 	It was an NFS install, just like you're trying.  I found that if
> I told the Slackware installer that it was NFS and specified the NFS
> path, it got all sorts of errors.  Most often it got errors 
> complaining
> about mount timeouts and RPC timeouts.  Which was really weird because
> my NFS server was working fine.  Finally, I used Alt-F? (3 I 
> think) and
> did a manual mount of the NFS mount point and that worked 
> fine.  Then I
> went back to the installer screen on F1 and told it to use a locally
> mounted path and specified the path to the NFS directory I 
> had manually
> mounted.  That worked perfect!  I never DID get the Slackware 
> installer
> on either laptop (PCMCIA network card) to mount the NFS directory
> successfully, but mounting it by hand manually and telling 
> the installer
> to use a local path, worked perfect, first time, both times.  This
> was also Slackware 8.
> 
> 	With 8 Meg of memory, swap is definitely going to be important.
> With that little memory, I don't thing the 2x rule (16Mb) would be
> appropriate.  You'll need more than that.  Don't know what you tried
> or what you have but I don't think I would give it less than 64Mb.
> If you try doing to much at one time, you'll spend your life in swap.
> 
> > I'll post my success or failure once I get there. :)
> 
> > --
> > Until later: Geoffrey		esoteric at denali.atlnet.com
> > 
> > "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from 
> mediocre minds.
> > The latter cannot understand it when a man does not 
> thoughtlessly submit
> > to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his
> > intelligence." - Albert Einstein
> 
> 	Mike
> -- 
>  Michael H. Warfield    |  (770) 985-6132   |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
>   (The Mad Wizard)      |  (678) 463-0932   |  
> http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
>   NIC whois:  MHW9      |  An optimist believes we live in 
> the best of all
>  PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471    |  possible worlds.  A pessimist is 
> sure of it!
> 
> --
> To unsubscribe: mail majordomo at ale.org with "unsubscribe ale" 
> in message body.
> 


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