981109 Monday ------------- Still no motherboard. Spend some of the evening building drives into the case and preparing, Some of the evening reading the Red Hat installation manual. Some of the evening playing Duke Nukem - Time to Kill on my Playstation :) 981110 Tuesday -------------- Still no motherboard. 981111 Wednesday ----------------- Got fed up waiting in the dark. Phoned Aria technologies, the Motherboard is not in stock and they have no idea when it will be. I also raised a concern that even though I had ordered a Pentium 166, I had received a chip with no identifying marks axcept a sticker marked CPU133. Aria advised me to return the chip for 'testing'. So I am now without a motherboard or a processor ! 981112 Thursday. ---------------- Packed up and posted the Pentium 1xx to Aria. In a moment of madness a little later, I blew the budget by phoning Insight computers and ordering a PC Chips M590 and an AMD K6-2 350 (with heat sink and fan) at a total cost of £182.07. Ouch !! They have guarunteed delivery tomorrow. (Friday) 981113 Friday -------------- Got home from work, fairly relaxed after a looong lunch :) 5:30 Arrived home from work. Motherboard and K6 arrived. Read motherboard manual unpack all items and lay on tabletop. Insert memory, no problem. Not P100 speed, remember to check MB speed. 5:40 OK... First question. RAM appears to have a voltage associated with it. Mine has no voltage marks and no manual. I have a Motherboard jumper choice of 3.3 or 5 volts. 3.3 wins the sweepstake Fit CPU. after some problems, looking at the pin layout showed one corner with no pins, enabling line up to be achieved. Fit Motherboard into case, It almost lines up with some of the holes :) Plug floppy and IDE cables in. 6:10 Plug sound output, VGA, Parrallel and serial, cables tinto Motherboard. 6:30 Fitted all bits and bobs, checked jumpers, Fitted anonymous IBM NIC. TIME TO SWITCH ON ! 7:20 After some faffing about with IDE cables inserted the wrong way round... and Floppy cables inserted the wrong way round, eventually get powered up, setup the bios, and boot from a PC-DOS 6.3 floppy. Format the harddrive to PC format. (It was Acorn.) Tonight I think I will install Win 95 just to 'prove' the hardware with a known, (hahaha), quantity. 7:30 Completed DOS install from floppy and load of CD ROM drivers. Reboot. Put Win 95 CDROM in drive... type "setup". 7:45 Win 95 completely installed and performing !. This is a fast computer ! Give it a bit of a workout with some fast mousing :) and a bit of software. All seems OK, (except it couldn't find the NIC) Time for a cigarette break :) 8:15 OK. Here I am... Redhat installation manual in one hand, CDROM in the other. Here Goes :) 8:40 OK.. I have now noted down on several sheets of A4, all the information I can find regarding the hardware setup and IRQs used. I got this info by perusing the hardware profiles dialogs in Win95. 8:45 Stick boot floppy in drive, . Press the buttons. Linux kernel loads and detects CDROM drive when prompted to do so. (Generic no-name ATAPI IDE) First stumbling block, Disc Druid disk partition software. It looks a little daunting. Time to RTFM. Make notes of which partitions to set up. Choose values close to the recomended ones but based on my small 1 gig hard drive size. Swap partition (roughly = to RAM) 41 Meg Root partition (for OS/system) 99 Meg /usr partition (for software/packages) 600 meg /home partition (for user data) 290 meg 9:00 Go and watch television for a while. 10:45 I'm back ! Create the partitions using disc druid. It's not too bad if you have RTFM properly and understand why you need the partitions. Choose which packages I need to install from a menu. I have no idea what they are but W_Windows sounds good as does X-Games. Also choose BRU desktop ???? and C programming environment. 11:00 Press the go button and Linux starts spinning the drives in a frenzy of activity, partitioning this, loading that. I have some doubts that there will be sufficient discage for all of the 'stuff' which I have selected. Does linux do an advanced check or is it just going to bomb out if it runs out of space ? 11:13 It looks as if I will be able to reclaim some of the space. It is installing help documents known as HOW TOs in every language I can think of. It's just finnished Italian and is starting on Polish ! 11:23 DISASTER. Yes, I have filled the disk. The installation bombed out when I had filled 598 Meg of my 600 Meg /usr partition. The machine locks up. gets me back to the first installation prompt. Its OK. I know what I'm doing now but this is a setback. 11:42 Press the go button again after going through the process. This time, was a great deal more selective about the packages I chose to install. I recalled reading a tip in the Linux Gazette. When Instaling Red Hat, select the option marked 'Choose individual packages'. This then enables you to browse through the headings and see what you are getting. You still need to know what you are looking for in order to change the defaults. However, I came accross a couple of old friends, some infocom games which I chose to install. Under the documentation heading I found all of the different languages which I ensured were not selected. Under development languages I found BASIC. Unselected by default, I selected it to see how it stacks up against BBC BASIC 5. Under this option it tells you how much disc space it needs before you press the go button. I have got it down to 282 Meg. Time for a cigarette while the HD is being filled. :-) 11:49 No time !!! It is done. No matter. I will take a break anyway :) 12:05 Return to desk. Answer some simple questions about the mouse. Then some difficult questions about the graphics card whose chipset is unsupported, (or at least unnamed on the list of options) I chose unsupported card, then standard SVGA. My Acorn AKF60, (Microvitec) is also unsupported, However, I can remember what it was capable of in terms of resolution under Riscos and entered those screen defaults when prompted. The line rate I got from the MDF after loading it into !Makemodes. 12:20 Prompted to make a boot disk. Root around and find a 1.44 floppy disk from somewhere. Make boot diskette. One last question which is explained in the Red Hat manual and Linux reboots. 12:25 Log in as root, using the password entered earlier. Create a new user account for me. (useradd) Create a password for that new user. (passwd) logout login as me, (RBRIDD) with new password. Voila. One clean install of Linux to the command line. check things out using Midnight commander, (mc), which is a sort of a DOSshell on steroids. Play a couple of games and generally poke around. 12:50 Time for bed. Tomorrow, configuring the X Server to get a graphical front end configured. 981114 Saturday --------------- 10:45 Boot up and log in as RBRIDD. Read the manual, which says that as I have already configured the X server, all I need to do is start X manually. It is possible to configure X to start automatically from boot up, but I will stick with manually for the mo. 10:55 OK Problem here. X refuses to start. I have seemingly made a mistake with the configuration of my unsupported graphics chipset. Linux is trying to start X with a 1024 x 768 screen resolution but is failing because of lack of video RAM. M=Now my motherboard is supposed to have 4 meg of video RAM built in, which is sufficient to support, (quick calculation) 1024 x 768 in 24 bit. Almost scrolled off the top of the screen is a message saying 'Trident Chipset' and SVGA videoram = 512k. This may be a consequence of me choosing the SVGA default for the X server given that I didn't have a graphics card supported. Hmmm. 11:30 So I have now tried many combinations of settings, culminating in an attempt to get the X server working at 640 x 480 in 8 bit colour. still it claims not to have sufficient video memory. Stumped. 11:45 Browsed the web to look for a solution. SiS6326, (the Graphics chip set), and Linux typed into Alta Vista brought a match pointing me at the SUSE website. SUSE Linux have drivers for this chipset and they are packaged in an RPM, (which I now know stands for Redhat Package Manager). This looks promising so I download them. Fortunately it comes in at just over a megabyte so I can get it on to a floppy. 12:15 Now we are running up against my ignorance of 'how things work'. Having put the floppy in the drive on the Linux box, I cannot read it. Maybe I have to 'mount' it, but how does that work. The MAN pages haven't helped. Time for some more RTFM. 15:00 Back from playing squash. 18:00 3 hours RTFMing to no avail. I have discovered how to see what's on the Floppy drive in hex, but not to actually mount it, read the directory, and copy stuff off it ! 18:30 Give in to temptation, discard the 'man in the street journey of discovery' crap and phone a friend who 'knows unix'. Learn from him the correct syntax of the mount command, which I could not understand from the Man pages or the online help. There is a lesson here which is that all of the documentation has been written by people who already know how to do it. There are areas missed out which 'everybody knows'... but everybody doesn't know ! 18:45 Mount Floppy, read floppy, give up for the day.