LINUX

Installing LINUX can be done in many ways. I have primarely been using the so-called slackware distribution, and below I will list some of the salient points that I found to be useful to jot down. Either they were hard to find, or they were so useful that you ought to know about them before you read all the documentation (let me tell you: there is a lot!).

I've also installed both of Caldera's previews, but still find them cumbersome (their backup system is supposed to be good), being used to slackware.

UMSDS LINUX on a 386 SX-16

My first LINUX installation was on a 4Mb 386SX-16 machine, using the so-called UMSDS filestystem (I tried it when this machine had 2Mb, but that didn't work despite earlier claims). This allows you to use the current MDSOS partition and you don't need to reformat your hard drive. If you want to get serious, I don't recommend going this route, but it's a great way to get started and see if your hardware can handle LINUX. My machine was very generic VGA, no special hardware, pretty much off the shelf. With the right things at hand, installing LINUX takes no more than 15 minutes. Some noteworthy things, might you *ever* want to take this route:

I tried an 8Mb swap, but the C compiler did not even want to compile the most simple "hello world" program. Boosting it to 12Mb did miracles. I have not even run into a single compilation problem. Remember, I only had 4Mb of physical memory. And since this setup is not clealry described anywhere (really?) here is what i did after the boot/root and login as root:
```
	mount -t umsdos /dev/hda1 /mnt
	dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/swap bs=1024k count=12
	mkswap /mnt/swap 12288
	swapon /mnt/swap
	setup
```
from thereon you can follow the instruction, but remember to set no more swap in setup, and fake it's not needed. Your diskname (hda1 in my case) may be different of course.
The tinyX distribution of X-windows (on my machine it did not use the mouse, but keyboard accellerators - perhaps I hadn't read enough documentation). X windows ran fine though, though kind of slow of course.
The mgr windows manager. Much cheaper than X, but it does not use color. I also runs on the AT&T 3b1 on Sun sparc stations. I wasn't too impressed. Perhaps this was fun in the 80s, but these is the 90s, and not for too long anymore either.

UMSDS LINUX on a 486DX2-66 (Gateway-2000)

Getting only slightly frustrated with the speed of the above configuration a friendly collegue let me use her 486DX2-66, a Gateway-2000 with a CrystalScan monitor. I used the same route as above, but could never get the PS/2 busmouse that this Gateway uses to work. I have been told one has to just reconfigure the kernel. I also tried the latest (oct '94) Slackware 2.1 distribution. This is the one with kernel 1.1.59.

LINUX on a 486DX2-66 (ASUS PC/I-486SP3G w/ ATI Mach32)

Finally, one day before the last day in 1994, I did get my own megaflop machine, a 486DX2-66 based machine. It's one of those no-name brands, bought at a local company at the recommendation of some local LINUX enthousiasts. It has an ASUS PC/I-486SP3G motherboard (this one has on-board SCSI and IDE drivers) and mine came with a 540Mb SCSI-II drive.

Used the public domain program FIPS to split the partition (after making sure with SCANDISK and DEFRAG, DOS6 utilities, that this was safe) to create a 200Mb DOS and 300Mb LINUX partition. Decided to use 16Mb for a separate LINUX SWAP partition.
Installed slackware, disks A, AP, D, N, X, XAP, XD, XV and TCL.
- 33 BogoMips, 30,000 drystones/s, 75,000 xstones (xbench) 1.6 Mflops (linpack), 1.4Mb/s SCSI-II linux disk i/o (iozone) vs. 0.4 Mb/s SCSI-II msdos disk i/o.
- ConfigXF86 - SuperProbe: hard to find the right clocks
- use minicom to dial into campus, then setup a term-term connection and use the modem-line as multi-...
- term can run remote X programs on your local server using txconn. netscape was one of the worst, taking up to 6 minutes even to appear on the screen. (see below for better solutions).
- mosaic killed my X server, haven't used it since (netscape is much better)
- netscape with the proxy http. Great!
- SLIP dialup to UMD, speed down from 1.55 to 1.2 k/s on ftp.
Installed various programs and packages
- MIRIAD
- NEMO: had not been done before
- Starlab: had not been done before
- HDF, saoimage, gids
Recompiled the kernel - taking it's memory share down by nearly a factor of 2. The program dmesg will show you the boot logfile from the last boot. Recently installed the new kernel, 1.2.0, with modules. These are device drivers or options you can dynamically add or remove to/from your kernel. For example, I did not install ELF support yet, or plan to use the MacIntosh filesystem. However, with the modules support you can.
Added an ethernet card (NE2000 compatible for the ISA bus , $45) and got up to 450k/s transfer rates.
Added a second IDE (ISA card), from which I can run some more disks. Somehow an old 40Mb Seagate drive didn't want to be slave. It's a BOCA IDE-100, ($19 at Best Buy, june 1995)
Added (and removed) a Sony CDU-55E from 'Sun Moon Star' double-speed CDROM ($145 at CompCity, june 1995, seen it for $99 at Best Buy on sale). Although it comes with an IDE drive, I got this CD to work as slave on my first IDE (of course compiling in IDE/Atapi and ISO-9660 filesystem into the kernel, I used 1.3.0). Also had to buy a Y-internal-power-cable, since they were all occupied. returned the drive, too many IDE lockup problems
Added (and removed) a soundcard. Works great, but the kind of applications are limited. I returned the card to its rightful owner, my wife.
Added (and removed) a Toshiba XM3301 single speed SCSI CDROM ($59 refurbished from Sun via private dealer) blocksize problems, perhaps related to the hardware patch that goes around for this drive
Added a CHINON CDS-431/435 single speed SCSI ($50 at Intellisys) CDROM. Works fine, got the sound to work only via xmcd, not from workman. Also 'eject' doesn't work, although it does from inside xmcd.
Networked another Linux workstation. See also my net comments, but basically remember that:
- you normally have to set the ethernet card to use either RJ45 or BNC mode via a software setup program (some ethernet drivers report which one is used)
- if you use RJ45, be sure to use a null modem (input_1 with output_2)
- if you use BNC, use 50 ohm terminators on the T.
Added a HP38580A HP DAT drive. Seems to work, at about 150-200 kB/s. ($550 privately from a local reseller, w/10 tapes). Came as external, but moved it to internal. By now I had to have an extra SCSI outlet imprinted into my SCSI cable.
Added a EZ135 SyQuest drive. Competitor to the 100Mb ZIP drive, (which I've tried), I found this drive to be superior. I have the IDE type, it is really nice and small (of course I choose it to be not portable, the heck with that) and has the same size as the small 3 1/2" floppy. Easy to forget: stick a cartridge in the drive when you boot!
Moved the whole lot over from the mid-tower to a full tower ($75 from a local retailer). Now I have 7 bays filled, and 3 still free.
my favorite list of odd things about linux
Problems:
- warm boot doesn't (always?) get past the SCSI test, the machine hangs and I have to cold boot. Equally a LOADLIN boot (=warm boot) doesn't work.
- LILO worked fine on the 540Mb /dev/hda when that was the boot drive, but now that the 1200Mb is /dev/hda it doesn't. Putting LILO on /dev/sda failed, because it is not the 'first drive' anymore now that there are IDE drives in the system. [aug-95]
- never got that 40Mb seagate to work as slave. [jun-95] (CAM incompatibility?)
- bought a ZIP drive (external SCSI, $199 - june 95), but could never hook it up, since it has 25-pin, for which no cables exist to connect to mny 50-pin flat-ribbon internal SCSI. Since they plan to come out with an internal version of the ZIP drive, and the now upcoming 1Gb zip drive, I returned the drive [18-jun-95] Of course I later baught the EZ135 from the competition.

LINUX on a Gateway-2000 (486DX2-66, P5-100)

FIPS refused to splice the disk into a second partition, claiming the last block was being used it could not move. Eventually, after reading FIPS.DOC, we found a hidden read-only file in the root (C:\) directory, that we removed... After that everything worked fine.
In setting up X windows: this was with a MACH64 (2Mb) card on a P5-100 and a Vivitron-1572 15". The 1280x1024 mode was skipped (X claimed the required dot clock was too high) and I decided to set the virtual screen size to 1024x768, but X windows keeps using 1280x1024.

LINUX on a 486DX4-100 WinBook XP laptop

Pretty much followed the slackware 2.1 route. We have two of these in the department.

50 BogoMips, 30,000 drystones/s
XFree3.1: VGA16 worked pretty much without problems, but the SVGA driver doesn't want to return to a console without reboot: it stays in some kind of wrong h/v-sync.
(5-may-95) We now have what seems to be a working XF85Config file, that works under SVGA (256 color) mode.

BENCHMARK

Here is some benchmarks. Time is in seconds CPU. nbody5 is Aarseth's N-body integrator, a real (fortran) program , hack1 is the abbreviation for NEMO's hackcode1 benchmark (64 timesteps on 128 particles).

    Machine        nbody5    hack1
    ------------   ------    -----
    sparc-1        1122.1     17.14 neptune
    sparc-2         479:       5.55 lmc
    486dx2-66       450:       6.27 rigel
    sparc-5         270:       2.73 pluto
    p5-75           193.6      3.03 lab
    p5-100          146.9      2.30 rights
    sparc-20/51?    139.8      1.57 phoenix
    sparc-20/60?     97.2      1.23 gemini
    ------------   ------     -----

Note the sparc-20/60 has a SuperCACHE, and both the 20s have a SuperSPARC.

Peter Teuben; 21-jan-96