INSTALL NOTES FOR LINUX v0.96 Jim Winstead Jr. - July 4, 1992 This file contains basic instructions for installing Linux v0.96. More detailed instructions have been written by others. Read the Linux FAQ for some suggestions, and for pointers to other installation documents. COPYRIGHT Linux 0.96 is NOT public domain software, but is copyrighted by Linus Torvalds (torvalds@cc.helsinki.fi). The copyright terms follow the GNU Copyleft. See the file COPYING from any GNU software package for the finer points. Note that the unistd library functions and all library functions written by Linus Torvalds are exempt from this copyright, and you may use them as you wish. WARNING The 0.96 root disk requires the 0.96b or later kernel. A bootable image of this kernel should be available where you got the image for the 0.96 root disk. INSTALLATION 1) First, and absolutely the most important step, MAKE BACKUPS OF YOUR SYSTEM! This system won't do anything nearly as nasty as coredump all over your harddrive (see 386BSD v0.0), but it is quite easy to accidently screw something up while installing. 2) Test out the Linux v0.96b boot disk with the Linux v0.96 root disk. If you are unable to get the boot disk to work properly on your system, try posting to comp.os.linux, or contacting Linus. Notice that Linux (as of v0.95) contains an init/getty/login suite, and this will start up 'login' on the first four virtual consoles, accessed by Left-Alt-F[1234]. If you experience problems on one virtual console, it should be possible to switch to another one. 3) login as 'install', and the system will walk you through the process of installing Linux on a hard drive partition. The process is fairly automated, but the process requires that you go through the steps of creating a partition for Linux usage. Some tips follow: Read the efdisk file from the intro login, which will explain the basic concepts of hard disk partitions, and how to use efdisk. You may find it useful to login to one virtual console as intro, so you can access the on-disk documentation, and another as install, so you can do the installation and easy access the documentation. The maximum size of a Minix filesystem (the type created by mkfs) is 64 megabytes. This is not a limitation of mkfs or Linux, but a limitation of the Minix filesystem that is used. With the release of Linux v0.97, a new 'extended' filesystem will be released that will support 4 terabyte (!) partitions, and extended filenames. 4) You should now have a complete (but very basic) root filesystem on your harddrive. To be able to boot from floppy with this as your root filesystem, you will have to edit the boot diskette. This is done by modifying the word at offset 508 (decimal) with a program such as Norton's Disk Editor, or use pboot.exe (available where you got this file, the boot disk and the root disk, hopefully.) This word is in 386-order (that is, least-significant byte first), which means it should look like one of the following: LSB MSB - device -------------------------- 01 03 - /dev/hda1 LSB = Least-Significant Byte 02 03 - /dev/hda2 MSB = Most-Significant Byte 03 03 - /dev/hda3 04 03 - /dev/hda4 41 03 - /dev/hdb1 42 03 - /dev/hdb2 43 03 - /dev/hdb3 44 03 - /dev/hdb4 The numbers are in hex, and if you're editing the boot diskette by hand, these two bytes should initially be 00 00 (and are followed by two non-zero bytes). Note that pboot.exe predates Linux 0.95a, so some of the information it presents is inaccurate (it refers to the old hd* naming scheme). The codes to use are as above, but with the most- significant byte first. (So /dev/hda1 = 0301, /dev/hda2 = 0302, etc.) 5) You should now be able to boot from this diskette and it will use your new Linux partition as the root partition. You'll notice, however, that you can't do a whole lot with just the programs on the root diskette. You'll need to get further packages from whereever you got the root and boot diskettes, and read these from a floppy using tar and compress. (Simple instructions: Download the file to DOS, use rawrite to write the tar file to diskette. Use 'tar zxvf /dev/' to read the file from floppy, where is the appropriate floppy device. (PS0 is a 1.44 meg 3.5" as A:, PS1 is a 1.44 meg as B:, at0 is a 1.2 meg as A:, at1 is a 1.2 meg as B:.) 6) To reboot your machine when running Linux, you should use the 'reboot' command. This makes sure to flush all caches to disk, and notifies other users that the system is going down (well, the last bit isn't real important). FAILURE TO DO THIS COULD RESULT IN BADLY CORRUPT FILESYSTEMS. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- These instructions are not the best, but should be enough to get you going. If you have more questions, either post on comp.os.linux, or send mail to me (jwinstea@jarthur.Claremont.EDU), or to Linus (torvalds@cc.helsinki.fi). Remember, the only stupid questions are the ones that you don't ask.