Hi folks,

With JPM playing our host,we met at Astral's office this afternoon as
planned. The following penguins managed to make it to the place --> JPM,
Arup, Indra, Darshan, Rohit, Dwaipayan and friend (sorry! can't seem to
recall the name). Hitesh from Astral was also present....

The highlights:--

We found ourselves installing Linux on a Intel PII 400 MHz/128 MB RAM/8 gig
HDD machine, which already had Win98 installed on it  (and there began our
sad saga :-)

A custom install of RHL 5.2 from the PCQ Mar'99 CD was unable to
create/initialize swap space which had been allocated on /dev/hda12. All
attempts at making it work failed. Quite predictibly, the culprit was
Win98, which had messed up the partition table so badly that
fdisk/cfdisk/disk druid were failing while apprently showing us as having
succeeded. 

Since a custom install was giving so much of problem, I figured that it
might be worth a try to do a server install, sure enough it "worked". But
it left us -- at least Arup & myself, utterly horrified & disgusted with
Redhat's way of doing things. Barring W9x, I fail to recall as when I had
seem such farcical stuff. Something good did come out of this endeavor
though...we can now safely say that if you are going to do anything serious
on you Linux box, particularly if you plan on using X....DON'T USE THE
SERVER INSTALLATION OPTION!!! 

We managed to download & install the latest WindowMaker (0.60)....although
the going wasn't so easy.  

Our attempts to compile Apache with JServ were wonderfully frustrated
apparently by the wizardry of the rpm packaging format. It left us
pondering wistfully over the good old days of simple .tgz....installing
anything was so much easier (ok...you had to know what went where....but
knowledge like that has never been known to hurt anybody ;-) We battled on
till right till the end before leaving Astral's office at around 10:00
PM.... 

We left with A REAL BAD FEELING (tm) about the state we left the machine
in...sure, most of the stuff is working, but its quite a mess....Arup & I
plan to go over again to redo most of it, sometime this week.

And now one of the lighter moment, while trying ot setup dialup networking
we faught hard to discover why we were unable to connect...our failure was
finally located to a modem cable that we had forgotten to connect to the
serial port ;-)

--Indra.

PS. For the sake of truth I must add, that although I have used the plural
"we" to describe our actions it was Arup, our resident guru who actually
did the work :)


Indian Linux User Group -- CALCUTTA Chapter
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