Floppy? Ack, watch me go down in flames for this, but LS120s are great floppies. I have had zero problems with them and my previous experience was that I had difficulty writing on one computer and trying to read on another after about 6 months use. Somehow, they seem to become eccentric. On the other hand, LS120s cost more than the average motherboard.
AFAIK, /boot on the IDE and all other partitions on a SCSI should(tm) work.
Network? Hmmm, I have had good luck with <ducks> Realtek RTL8029 for about $9 each, a PCI ne2K very poor clone. I have also used 3Com509xyz 3Com905 and 3Com Vortex as well as Intel 10/100s and some awful things based on a Winbond Chip (which is a black hole for SCSI probes, so don't use it on your system) with acceptable results. The only ones I have had trouble with are SMC cards. Anyway the metalab.unc.edu site should have a Linux Ethernet HOWTO which lists cards and their abilities.
The initscripts are listed at the site http://www.linux-mandrake.com
in the "updates" section. I didn't dissect them but I would
assume /etc/rc.d directories and some others would be involved.
I have never set up a SMP machine, but I do recall that there is also an updated LILO booter for SMP machines among those updates. It might be necessary to run single-processor til you make that update.
Best of luck. If you make some discoveries, remember to share. Never can tell when someone else will benefit from the knowledge you gain.
Civileme
John Aldrich wrote:
Well, let me recap what I *do* have (hardware wise):
I have a PCI/ISA-ONLY motherboard with DUAL-PPro 200's.
I have 192 megs of RAM, almost 11 GIGS of drive space (heck, I might
dual-boot Red Hat 6 and Mandrake just for the fun of it <G>)
I have an Advansys Ultra SCSI PCI card. On-board is an SB-16/clone built-in.
Still to get: Floppy, Network and Video. AGP is out -- no AGP slot on a
PPro. :-)If I read all the threads correctly, I should IMMEDIATELY get the updated
kernels and SOX, etc. Which files are the "initscripts"? I am used to doing
a "custom" install with everything except the foreign-language "how-to"
files, and I'll certainly have the drivespace for it. With SCSI, do I still
need to have the /boot in the first 1023 cylinders? If so, I may have /boot
on an IDE and boot from IDE and have the rest of the system on my 9.1 GB
SCSI.Let me also recap that I'm NOT exactly a newbie, but I'm no expert either...
:-) I've been running Linux for the past 6 months at work (dual-booting
between Linux and Win98, mostly staying in Linux <G>) I think I'm taking on
a bit of a challenge here setting up an SMP machine. :-)
John
-- Civileme Say: "One who buys on leading edge soon know feeling of slide down razor blade of life."
