NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #1/NN_1993_1.iso/spool/comp/os/linux/22836

Text File | 1993-01-06 | 1.8 KB | 38 lines

Newsgroups: comp.os.linux
Path: sparky!uunet!gatech!destroyer!cs.ubc.ca!unixg.ubc.ca!kakwa.ucs.ualberta.ca!acs.ucalgary.ca!eneli!barker
From: barker@eneli (Scott Barker)
Subject: Installing Linux on a PS/Valuepoint
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Date: Tue, 05 Jan 93 23:03:26 GMT
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Let me just say to begin with that it was a pain in the ass. Just goes to show
you that you should NEVER buy genuine IBM. Anyway, that's just what a friend
of mine did, and we spent hours finding out why Linux would not recognize his
hard drive, or his B floppy drive. Turns out that IBM altered that "standard"
information in the CMOS and the BIOS, so when Linux checked them for the drive
configuration, it died. We had to install Linux on a non-IBM machine, make
some changes to the kernel source code, recompile, make a boot disk, and then
everything was ok. This method is, of course, no use to anyone without access
to a second machine.

So, I'm wondering if something can be done to the SLS distribution to allow
for verification of drive auto-detection. Since neither I, nor my friend, are
particularly good at 486 assembly, we don't know how to add this to the boot
procedure, and we would prefer to not have it in the kernel, since then you
would have to go through the verification procedure each time Linux is booted.

If any of this makes sense, maybe someone could suggest a way to work this fix
into the SLS distribution.

Oh, and the psaux.c mouse driver doesn't work with my friend's ps/2 mouse. Go
figure :) Anybody know how to fix that?

--
Scott Barker
[e-mail]