This Month In Chaos Manor:
Linux, Of Mice and Trackballs, Aquazone, More On 'The Microsoft File' (Is Less)
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the 217th installment of Jerry Pournelle's popular "Chaos Manor" column, which was a mainstay of Byte Magazine for many years.
THE NEW "resurrection" Pentafluge works just fine. You may recall, this is a minimum Windows 95 writing system built up from what was left of one of the first Pentium systems ever assembled outside Intel, courtesy of Intel who supplied the chip and mother board.
The original Pentafluge used a Pentium 50 chip in a Socket 4 board. I doubt that they even make those chips now. A couple of years ago I upgraded the system with an Intel Overdrive, and that made it fast enough to serve as a general purpose writing machine. It wasn't really fast enough for modern games, but it was certainly fast enough for Office 95, and it would burn CDROM's with a Phillips CD/R External SCSI drive. It was connected into my network with an Intel EtherExpress 10 base 2 (coax or ‘thin net') board, and had a Maxstor 5 1/4" optical Read/Write drive for backup, overflow, and mass storage. All told, it was a perfectly serviceable general purpose system.
Then I got what I thought was a 200 mhz Kingston chip upgrade for Pentafluge. That sat here for weeks until I began to feel guilty about it, so one afternoon I hoisted Pentafluge up on a work stand and opened him up. The machine was full of dust. The motherboard was "full size" as was the DPT SCSI disk controller. All this was mounted in a full size tower PC Power and Cooling case heavy enough to make it hard work getting it up on the work stand.
After I vacuumed out the system I removed the Intel Overdrive chip and set it aside. Then I took out the new Kingston chip, and realized I had a problem. The Kingston chip was for a Socket 7 system. Socket 7 chips have one chip missing in one corner, making it impossible to insert them in the wrong way into a Socket 7 chip mount. Alas, Socket 4 chips do not have that missing chip, and Socket 4 has holes for all the pins. I realized to my horror that it might be possible to mount the new chip into that old socket, but I had no clue as to which way it should be oriented, and in fact I shouldn't try that. Time to put it back the way it was.
Unfortunately, I hadn't marked the orientation of the Intel Overdrive chip I had removed. The Overdrive documents were long gone. I made what I thought was an intelligent guess and inserted the Overdrive chip, held my breath, turned on the system – and saw a bright red glow on one spot on the chip. That chip was well cooked. Dead in a second. As a result I changed motherboards for Pentafluge. I used an EFA Socket 7 motherboard and an Intel Pentium 133 chip, both obtained on sale from Fry's for about $89. This has the advantage that if I ever need USB I'll have it easily available.
The main problem with the installation was that the DPT controller board is "full size". Most new motherboards won't take full size boards in either PCI or ISA slots. Fortunately I had an Adaptec 1520 ISA SCSI board, and I used that to drive the DEC SCSI 1 gigabyte hard disk. DEC doesn't make disk drives any more. That's a pity because this sure is reliable and quiet. I had feared that changing controllers would require me to do a low level reformat of the hard disk, but that turned out not to be the case. When I changed controllers, the machine booted up from the old hard disk with
no problems. I never used an EFA motherboard before, but this one works just fine.
The rebuilt system went upstairs to the Monk's Cell (a spare bedroom where I write fiction: no telephones, no modems, no games, and no books), and has become my fiction writing machine. It works just fine. It's no faster than the old Pentafluge with the Intel Overdrive chip, and in fact it may be just a bit slower. I'd have been better off just
carrying the old system upstairs, another proof of the old adage that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. On the other hand, my "upgrade" cost less than $100, and the machine is certainly fast enough for the writing I do on it. I suppose there's a moral in that story although for once I'm not sure what it is. The main lesson here is that if you do intend to change motherboards, be sure that the boards you intend to put in the upgraded system will fit: with many new motherboards the chip fan or power conditioner will get in the way.
* * *
THE NEWEST machine at Chaos Manor is Linette, so called because the notion was to build a box to run Linux. For those few who haven't been watching, Linux is a "free" version of the UNIX operating system and has become quite popular among computer enthusiasts.
I built Linnette out of an MSI motherboard and a CYRIX MX chip. That's probably more chip than a Linux box needs: one of the great advantages of Linux is that it will run quite nicely on older machines, including old 486 systems. Once I get used to Linux I intend to install it on an elderly 486 computer just to see what happens; stay tuned. The Linux
(UNIX) operating system is much more efficient than Windows 9X or NT, which is why you get so much speed out of older systems. Of course it doesn't do the same things as Windows. There is an X-Windows component to Linux that does give you a kind of Windows environment, but some Linux enthusiasts think that's not worth the bother.
I set up Linette with a Maxtor 6.5 gigabyte EIDE hard disk, a random 3.5" floppy, 64 megabytes of Kingston memory, the TEAC 6 CDROM Changer (largely because that wasn't in use when I was putting the system together and it was handy), a Creative Labs Ensonic PCI Sound Card, an STB Velocity 128 Video Card, and a Sohoware Fast SFA110A 10/100 PCI Fast Ethernet adapter. That latter was on sale at Fry's with 25 feet for Level 5 Ethernet cable for under $25 and was a bargain I couldn't resist.
I first used fdisk to create a 1 gigabyte partition for DOS and Windows 98. Since I don't know Linux at all, I thought I had better stick to something I did know until I was sure all the hardware worked properly, so I installed DOS including the CDROM drivers, then started installation of Windows 98. When I am setting up a machine that will normally run Windows, I generally copy the setup and "cab" files – the system files compressed using Microsoft's compression system – to a subdirectory conventionally named WINDOWS/OPTIONS/CABS and install from there. However, that takes up considerable disk space and since this machine wasn't going to run Windows much longer than it would take to check out all the hardware, I didn't do that.
My first problem was that I have an upgrade edition of Windows 98, and I had no Windows installation on the machine. The Win 98 installation program demanded proof that I owned Windows to upgrade from. I had the Windows 95 installation floppies stored in the back room, and rather stupidly I thought to use those rather than the Windows 95 CDROM.
Big mistake. The Win 98 installation program wanted nine of those disks, and trundled from 4 to 9 minutes per disk, wasting about an hour of my time. Long before it was over I was ready to dump the whole mess and start over, but by then I wanted to know just how far this Microsoft paranoia would go. It went a long way. Fair warning: if you want to install an upgrade version of Windows 98, it's about as fast to install Windows 95 first.
Of course if you have Windows 95 on a system it's rarely worth upgrading to Windows 98 to begin with; and if you are a Word Perfect user, DO NOT under any circumstances "upgrade" to Windows 98. Windows 98 hates Word Perfect, and can destroy Word Perfect files in interesting ways that make them unrecoverable. Let me repeat this strongly: if you use Word Perfect, stay with Windows 95 and DO NOT change to Windows 98.
My second problem was with the mother board: for some reason the PS/2 mouse just doesn't work. The motherboard has a documented pinout for a PS/2 mouse. It wasn't the mouse: I made sure to use a well tested mouse. For that matter I used the same PS/2 mouse that the system couldn't detect, added a serial port adapter, and inserted that into the COM1: port. It worked just fine, so I decided to stay with a serial mouse.
That done everything else went perfectly, and soon enough I had the system working under Windows 98. I tested the Ethernet, the Sound Card, and various video settings. I put in Microprose This Means War and tried that. I use This Means War to test system performance because it puts a lot of moving objects on the screen, and on older and slower machines it tends to hang up for multiple second periods. That didn't happen. The Cyrix MX chip and the STB Velocity 128 Video Board are fast: I never saw This Means War run smoother, even on a Pentium 266 system. Then and there I decided that when I get Linux installed on this machine I'll change to a different chip, and use the
Cyrix MX for a new Windows 98 system intended for games.
Linux is a freeware operating system. That means that in theory you could surf the Internet and download everything you would need to install Linux on any system you like. In practice this would be very difficult, and most people choose instead to buy a packaged version with installation aids. Of those, by far the most popular appears to be RED HAT LINUX, which I have seen on sale at Fry's. I have also seen it being given away at computer shows. I installed Red Hat on Linette.
This is a pretty daunting operation. The Red Hat book is thick and full of information, some of which is in the style of "clear only if you already knew it." Other information is clear enough but scattered through the book. My first advice: if you are seriously interested in Linux, take the time to read through the first half of the Red Hat book before you begin. Then get the O'Reilly book "Learning the UNIX Operating System".
Spend some time with that, but more important, have it handy for when you get started.
Secondly, use a Windows machine to go to www.redhat.com and familiarize yourself with that web site. There's a wealth of information there as well as new hardware drivers. Much of the useful information is contained in FAQ files, and unless you're familiar with the site, some of them can be hard to find.
Once you do start, things go better than you might think. I inserted the Red Hat floppy in the drive and turned on the machine. It came up quickly, and had no problems finding the Red Hat CDROM in the TEAC 6 drive changer. The installation instructions come in many languages including Japanese and Turkish. Naturally I chose English. Then came
the first problem: it wanted me to partition the hard drive. It offered me two means of doing that, fdisk, and Red Hat Disk Druid.
Whatever you do, use Disk Druid. It's self explanatory, and easier to use than fdisk.
In the old days, UNIX users were taught to make a number of drive partitions: one called simply / which is the root partition; another ‘swap' partition which isn't named and which ought to be about twice the size of your physical memory; then /home, /usr, /var, and a bunch of others. Exactly why all this partitioning is desirable isn't clear to me, nor have I got a satisfactory explanation from UNIX guru's I've spoken with. I suspect it has to do with disk fragmentation and the fact that UNIX was originally intended as a multi-user system on big dinosaur machines (which would nevertheless have fairly small hard drives by today's standards). One had different partitions because each of those directories might well be on a different physical disk drive.
In any event, it isn't necessary to do all that partitioning. You can get away with a swap partition of, say, 120 megabytes or so, and put all the rest of your hard disk in one big / or root partition. You might also want to make a 10 megabyte /boot partition to hold all the bootup information and keep that separate from everything else.
As it happens I didn't do that: I made a whole bunch of partitions to use up the 5 plus gigabytes I had left on my big Maxtor drive. I'm not sorry I did that, but if I had it to do again I probably wouldn't bother.
Anyway, once I had all those partitions up I sort of followed my nose through the installation, and pretty soon I had Linux running. Alas, it was then I found there was no support whatever for the Sohoware Fast Ethernet card. I also got myself stuck in x-Windows without a mouse due to my having plugged the mouse into the wrong serial port. Since I was going to have to shut down and reinstall with a new Ethernet card, I decided to exit the drastic way: I pulled the plug.
The next time I turned the machine on, it took several minutes making tests. UNIX does that. It hates being improperly shut down even more than Windows 98 does. Eventually all was well, though, and I shut down in a more normal way. (/usr/bin/shutdown –h now issued from the root directory). Then I put in a Bay Networks NETGEAR FA 310TX Fast Ethernet PCI adapter ($29.95 at Fry's), inserted the Red Hat installation floppy, and started over. This went as smoothly as before, and as of now I have Linette up and running Linux, which means that I have this mysterious UNIX operating system prompt staring at me.
And there, I fear, the story ends for the month. I have Red Hat Applixware and other applications packages to install, I need to get the network running properly, I need to put in a modem, and once I have the network running properly I need to set up Linette as the print server and the net server talking to both Apple and Windows machines.
Moreover, I'm told that I can make this Linux box a router so that I can use it for Internet connections from every machine (including Apple) on my internal network. I'm looking forward to that—but I am out of time.
By next month I ought to know a lot more about UNIX in general and Linux in particular. Stay tuned. Meanwhile you now know enough to get started if you want to try it yourself.
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