I'm consolidating your two postings to reply to some specifics in each.
At 02:31 PM 5/5/99 +1000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote [combined and
abridged]:
>As far as I can tell, it's Red Hat's 5.0.[latest]
Latest? Not so. The latest (just out) is 6.0, using kernel 2.2.x . The last
2.0.x version was 5.2. Suggest you get at least 5.2. Can't say how to do
that in Australia; here in the US, there are places like www.cheapbytes.com
that sell low-cost CDs of the core, GPL'd release. Don't know if their
internetional servie is competitive with what you'd find locally (not even
certain that they ship internationally).
>But...
>- The system doesn't flash up with XWindows like it should,
What does this mean? X doesn't come up *before* the LILO prompt, and it
comes up automatically after booting only if you chose that runlevel.
Otherwise, you get a command-line "login:" prompt. If you want X to come up
by default after booting, you need to edit /etc/inittab . Find the line that
now reads (I may have the number wrong) "id:4:initdefault:" and change the
number to whatever runlevel runs xdm (this will be in a later line in
/etc/inittab). Or you can log in on the command line and use "startx" to run
X (assuming you've configured X during installation).
>- I installed the LILO in the Master Boot Record so that I should be able
>to DECIDE whether to boot under Linux or Win95 but this doesn't
>happen/work,
What does happen? Does it not boot at all? Boot immediately into Win95? Boot
into Win95 after a pause? If it hangs, does anything appear on the screen
before it hangs?
What are the details of your hard drives -- size and partitioning scheme?
We can't help you with this problem if you don't describe it.
>- I have to boot off the boot disk in the A drive (fd0 ???),
>- I have since changed the configuration of the machine's cards, etc, and
>- I feel inclined to install it all again on another disk (a slave) on
>another machine.
RH does a lot of detection of system hardware during installation, and
making hardware changes afterward can confuse it. Perhaps a more experienced
RH user can tell you what you need to do after making hardware changes.
Installing it on another machine is fine, as long as you plan to leave the
drive in that machine (moving it is just a big hardware change, with the
above problems).
>HOWEVER,
>- I could do it on a dedicated machine.
A good solution if you have the spare machine. But since you don't say what
doesn't work, we can't guess as to whether this will solve your problem.
Dual boot should work.
>My aspirations are to have a small LAN at home with several machines
>hanging off a 10BaseT 'Ethernet' mini-hub, including one dedicated to the
>local Amateur Radio packet network. Off the hub: under WIN 95, the children
>would have a slowish 486, my wife and I would have another slow 486 for our
>studies; under Linux 386 machine for me to play with; under Win 3.1 or
>Linux I'd have a radio packet 286/386 connected; we'd share a printer with
>its own print-server card... (and the fairies at the end of the garden
>could also have one too.) I have hardware for all that.
Linux on a 386? While this will work, it is pretty limiting (I wouldn't try
to run Xwindows, for example) ... these days, I rarely see Linux 386s, and
the ones I hear about serve very limited, dedicated roles. Linux *won't* run
on 286s (actually, I didn't remember that Win3.1 will). I don't really know
how well RH runs on a 386, though there are smaller, specialized versions of
Linux that still run nicely, for limited purposes. (Look at some of the
small distributions at ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/, for example.)
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
762 Garland Drive
Palo Alto, CA 94303-3603
650.328.4219 voice [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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