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/<floppy>' to read the file from floppy, where
<floppy> 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.
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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.