On Fri, 17 Sep 1999, Dr. Joel M. Hoffman wrote: > Well, I just bought a new Sony picturebook, and I'm trying to install > Linux on it. How hard could it be? I thought. Wrong. > > I've been trying all day and so far haven't even managed to get off > the ground. I've tried redhat's boot.img and bootnet.img, and all I > get is a pity "boot failed." So I tried slackware, and it craps out > after "LIL-". Now what?? I'll be grateful for any suggestions. Give us a little more - did you get an install finished? Which Red Hat version? Do you have the book, or are you just hoping with a CD? Have you looked in the CD (even in Dos or M$ Windoze) under /usr/doc/howto? Have you persisted to the end of anything that sounds relevant? Have you made a boot floppy? Can you boot from that? Have you got Red Hat's book? Have you tried their site. Make a decision; Either you are going the whole hog with this, or you are going away. If it gives you any comfort, I tried about 5 times before I got a working installation, and I thought I held the record. You have to fight these things. Now it's easy. Give your present installation one hour or so. Then start again. Choose RedHat for the ease of use, or SuSE. Slackware is more for the experts I believe. Linux writes notes to itself and hides them in wierd little files like /etc/resolv.conf. You might have to know what all these are and how to hack them to do much in 'expert' systems. Presuming you reinstall, try these partitions; /boot - at couple of megs UNDER THE 1024 CYLINDER LIMIT; This is the actual 1024 cylinders. If you have LBA on, and 64 heads set, (Check your HD in the BIOS setup) it has to be under 256 cylinders. If you can't get a partition here, boot from DOS or a floppy. Swap - as big as your RAM / or Root as the rest of your space for Linux. Line up as much data on your system as you can (Control Panel / System / Device Manager / Properties / View by Resources) and get all the details on each piece of hardware - the video, & sound , zip drives, modem, or whatever. Line up as much Beer, Rum, Whiskey, and other booze as you will allow yourself. Start the beer, and the linux setup at the same time. This is essential for sanity. Write down what went wrong. Join comp.os.linux.something - I think there's half a dozen newsgroups. Ask there for help. It'll cheer you up to find people worse off ;-) -- Regards, Declan Moriarty.
