Hello Friends of Arachne - I've noticed that while waiting for her second coming, a number of us who had not done so before have taken to tinkering around with various LINUXes including BASLINUX, Steven's ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) baby. At the risk of boring those who already know their way around LINUX and turning off those who are not interested, I thought I'd tell you how I put BASLINUX, X, and NETSCAPE onto a 120 MB DOS hard drive. If you're going to get upset with me for wasting your time, please hit the delete button NOW! Anyway, some of you who have been on the list for a while will remember that I had an awful lot of trouble getting a Compaq 590 to accept the packet drivers for Arachne. With help from many of you, I got it working via a circuitous roundabout route the details of which are now unimportant. I still haven't thrown it out and that's the machine with the small HD. First, I familiarized myself with the pared-down Slackware 3.5 version that Steven had prepared for a RAM disk. But of course 4 MB is very small, especially for LINUX. I was then tempted by Steven's add-on package to put the system on a HD permanently. Aside from his instructions, I had to do the following: 1. defrag the DOS disk to put all the data up front (in DR-DOS, that's DISKOPT) 2. use a partition resizing utility called PRESIZE (you can probably find it on the web, or if not, I can send you a copy) to cut down the DOS partition to as little as I could live with and without erasing any data (pay attention to the amount of free space shown by DOS and give yourself some latitude) 3. booted Steven's RAM DISK BASLINUX form DOS and used fdisk to make a linux partition. As Steven says: BE CAREFUL! (Hit p and you get the partition table. Your DOS disk will probably be partition 1 and have the bootable flag (*) set. Hit n and make a new partition (it will be linux, code 83, by default)) 4. reboot the machine to DOS and follow Steven's instructions in his HD install package (INSTL_HD.ZIP). 5. reboot again to DOS and make sure you can get from DOS to BASLINUX on the HD. 6. Assuming yes, and that you had previously (in the RAM version?) run PPPSETUP and familiarized yourself with LINKS, go to the Slackware/slakware/x1 site and download the 5 packages needed for the X-system (x332bin.tgz; x332cfg.tgz; x332fnts.tgz; x332lib.tgz; x332SVGA.tgz (or x332VG16.tgz depending on your video) - Steven has more info on his site. 7. run xf86config. This is the trickiest part! You need to know about your monitor and your video card. Don't be surprised (or discouraged) if you have to do this several times. It will write XF86Config in the /etc directory. Type 'startx'. If you're lucky, you'll get something with the TWM windows manager. You probably won't like it. Use a text editor (E3=wordstar commands; or pico) to change /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc towards the bottom of the file to something you like (make a backup first). There are many permutations possible here. I removed xclock, one xterm window, and resized the other to fit my screen. Experiment, see what it looks like. Steven was also kind enough to provide me with icewm (but you've heard the plusses and minuses from Steven and Steve on the list). I suggest keeping it simple at first. 8. download Netscape 3.04 from the netscape site (there's a lot of stuff there. Steven suggested: http://home.netscape.com/download/archive/ client_archive30x.html and to look for 3.04 English > Netscape Navigator > Unix > Download: x86 LINUX ELF - complete install (40-bit encryption) 9. copy the downloaded file to the directory where you want to put Netscape (I chose /opt/ but Steven informs me this is usually /usr/local). He also says that his PKG script is for Slackware only, so you'll have to install using tar -xvf <filename>. You will need to make some PATH changes, or, as I prefer, to add an alias to the /root/.bashrc file (e.g., for me, alias nav='/opt/netscape/netscape') NB: If you don't have a .bashrc file, it is the same as the .profile file and you can copy the former from the latter (as far as I can tell). 10. netscape preferences can be set from the options button, but also in the /root/.netscape/preferences file if you want things to stay changed and if you want to set your homepage to /root/hotlist.html. I don't know whether I've inadvertently left out some critical step, which inevitably happens, but this is the general gist of how I got there. Steps 2 and 3 are probably the ones you need to be most careful about. I hope this is of some help to somebody, especially if the next version of Arachne comes out LINUX first. I do hope Michael will keep the libSVGA option though, and not force us to use "X" (hint,hint). And thanks Steven!!! Regards, Klaus Hameyer Burlington, VT (USA)
