A brief informal description of the 20 Sep 1997 Linux installation attempt.

   Many were present, both from MSCS 206 as well as from the Marquette Computer
Society.

   We originally had 2 local network site download options.
         (a) Slackware Linux from warrior:/home/pub/Linux/slakware
or
         (b) RedHat Linux from serva:/hot_software/Linux/RedHat_4.2/i386
Naturally both Linux versions are available over the Internet from well-known
ftp or web sites; but the file transfer rates from those remote sites would be
prohibitively slow.

   On Thursday and Friday evening I tried to copy the latest Slackware version
from the Internet, but it took an enormous amount of time (while I typed this
informal description on Saturday evening, I ran 5 simultaneous ftp sessions for
more than 4 hours to download Slackware from 5 different remote sites).
Anyway, version (b) was available on Saturday afternoon, thanks to Robb
Dubinski.

   Instead of re-installing a new warrior.mscs.mu.edu Linux version on the
current old Linux machine, we chose to install Linux on a new machine using
the temporary account guest.mscs.mu.edu. This was a wise decision, because
there were very many problems with our installation attempt.

   We started to `raw copy' the files boot.img and supp.img from our local fast
site (b). Using the boot.img disk we rebooted the PC that was going to become
guest.mscs.mu.edu (a temporary name). But we never got very far with the
installation because, as it later turned out, the boot.img boot program never
asked us about what kind of hard disk we had (we had a SCSI type hard disk, of
which there are many varieties). So we could not access our own hard disk using
the boot.img programs! So, instead, we booted the PC from its hard disk (on
which I still had an old Slackware Linux program making it look like
guest.mscs.mu.edu), and after mounting the (b) directory, we copied the (b)
release to the PC SCSI disk. Now back to rebooting with the boot.img and
supp.img disks that we had raw-copied from (b). This time we installed from the
PC system hard disk itself. Unfortunately, after rebooting, we couldn't log in
as root. Using the rescue option on boot.img, we got back into the system, and
added the line
        subroot::0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
to the password file with the command
        echo subroot::0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash >> passwd
After a proper shutdown and reboot we got in as subroot, and so established
full control over the new RedHat Linux on the PC.

   By this time only some 5 people were left.

Wim Ruitenburg