Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : LINUX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (1882)	11/29/1999 1:05:00 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2615

It is a caution, that is for sure. The question is: what caused it? I tried the Caldera 2.2 "demo" disk which the company assured me was complete distribution. It would not install free space in a drive that had windows on it. If you tried their cutdown version of partition magic it would in one incarnation refuse to install and not see the free space. In another where you frigged a bit it would see your free space but not install either. If you let it go and do an automatic install, thinking it would find the free space and put itself in it, it would repartition your drive so that the first space was Linux not DOS or win95 and install itself there. I was not the only one with this problem as some experienced Linux installers with this distribution had wiped their windows 95 or windows 98 section. The bug was it needed a primary partition to install in and if it saw one it went there. You could not convince it to make a new primary somewhere else. Worked fine on new hard disks that were not partitioned but did not do as advertised. I don't know if they have repaired the thing with version 2.3 or not. Parition magic is not perfect either. I have seen where it would not recognize partitions if made in Linux although it is supposed to recognize Linux. I guess Stormix has problems. Perhaps they are new to this thing. In fact the Lilo scripts are not easy to figure out. You have to know how the program works, which is primitive and limiting. If for instance you want to make a disk which will boot other disks from a floppy you have to work from those disks and put the absolute pathways on the mounted floppy in the lilo.conf script. The location of the map file has to be specified and the boot loader too. You would think that if you invoked lilo and told it it was working from a certain root that the scripts could be written to back out of the root if there was a higher level. No so. Bad or I should say primitive parsing it would seem. I will admit you can do the thing after figuring out how the program expects to see data but I say it is about as non-intuitive as it gets. That is the trouble with Unix. It assumes one knows how the program works. In fact when I see the phrase "root" it could be the root one uses upon booting. It does not mean that. It means the root the lilo setup-program sees when running. Where is it written that if one puts the word "disk=dev/hda" in a script that it will select the hard disk image and not the floppy? (it does) But if one puts just root =/dev/hda in the image section it will not select that root's image. And where is any of this written down? In a verbose and cryptic read-me doc file buried on the disk somewhere. Not even an easy to find disk index to find it. Just find / -lilo -print and wait 5 minutes. The lilo mini-how to helps but is hardly the font. Don't think logic will help you. It's not like the universe. It's just code the way some one thought it should work. Trial and terror. It's getting so you have to be an expert just to get to be an expert. EC<:-}