From: Digestifier To: Linux-Activists@news-digests.mit.edu Reply-To: Linux-Activists@news-digests.mit.edu Date: Fri, 3 Apr 92 18:15:36 EST Subject: Linux-Activists Digest #14 Linux-Activists Digest #14, Volume #2 Fri, 3 Apr 92 18:15:36 EST Contents: Any disk compression utility for linux? (Pradeep K Tapadiya) Swapfile vs. Swap partition (Tim Rhodes) Help, can't compile 0.95a! (Michael K. Johnson) ps095, gcc2.1, and 2Meg (Dahai Li) Re: diskbackup -> broken pile (R. Ramesh) Re: Any disk compression utility for linux? (Drew Eckhardt) Experience with Elite Group or Pony 386/33 motherboards ($99!) (Mark Saltzman) Disk formatting utility for 0.95a anyone? (Guido Kueppers) virtual memory problems (gary a moyer) Re: Help Mr. Fortran (Hongjiu Lu -- Graduate Student) Re: Reduce "gcc is broken" postings, was:HD timeout Errors (with .95a) (Theodore Ts'o) new-user (STEPHEN HUFNAGEL) Since I haven't seen an FAQ... (Sergio L Aponte) gcc2.1, no as (gas)? (Jiansheng Zhao) Re: backspace doesn't work with ash: work-around! (William A. Calderwood) .95a kernel panic? HELP (Joseph Dougherty) Linux doesn't recognize my HD (Johan Rudolf Sundstr|m) HD timeout (Brian Vandivier) Help with BOOTANY or PARTIT10 (not SHOESTRING) EMAIL RESPONSE REQUEST (Ira M. Laefsky) Re: Help, can't compile 0.95a! (Linus Benedict Torvalds) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: tpradeep@cs.tamu.edu (Pradeep K Tapadiya) Subject: Any disk compression utility for linux? Date: 3 Apr 92 17:00:36 GMT Howdy netters, In the DOS world, there is a great disk compression program, STACKER. It keeps all the files in a compressed form, compressing/decompressing them on the fly. My 65M harddisk reports 125M after using stacker. Since my disk i/o is slow, the overall performance of my machine has improved after using stacker. I probably can fit linux in another 30M harddisk I have. However, I wish I could have some more space. Is there any disk compression program which can be used with linux? Thank you. Pradeep tpradeep@cs.tamu.edu ------------------------------ From: rhodes@rhodes.cc.vt.edu (Tim Rhodes) Subject: Swapfile vs. Swap partition Date: 3 Apr 92 17:07:16 GMT I am planning on installing linux this weekend. I'll have to repartition my hard drive which I plan to do with regular DOS tools. My question is which is preferable, using a partition for swap space or or a swapfile? For my setup, how many partitions should I define. Also in using a seperate partition, the RELNOTEs remark is not clear if I need to make a file system on a swap partition or if the mkswap does it all. Sorry if these questions are answered in docs on the floppy images. Thanks ... -- Tim Rhodes rhodes@rhodes.cc.vt.edu (NeXTMail accepted) Sr Systems Engineer RHODES@VTVM1.CC.VT.Edu Virginia Tech RHODES@VTVM1.BITNET ------------------------------ From: johnsonm@stolaf.edu (Michael K. Johnson) Subject: Help, can't compile 0.95a! Reply-To: johnsonm@stolaf.edu (Michael K. Johnson) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1992 18:33:34 GMT From: wjb@cogsci.cog.jhu.edu (Bill Bogstad) >>I'm unable to compile Linux 0.95a, I have installed the new sources >>and bootup with the 0.95a binary kernel image, using the old gcc (1.40?), >>and I get and error "cc1 got return code 16" when compiling fork.c! >>Does this anything to to with the old gcc compiler? Or do I need new library >>for 0.95a? > > I can only offer my solution, not any reason why. It seems >that my 4Meg of RAM is insufficient for this mem hog. ... I have a 8 Meg system and also am having problems compiling fork.c. I would have thought that would have been sufficient.... Read the FAQ -- search for -fcombine-regs. Basically, 1.40 needs -fcombine-regs, which is not needed for 2.0. The sources come ready to compile with gcc2 -- so you need to edit the makefiles to take out the # comment before the line containing -fcombine-regs michaelkjohnson johnsonm@stolaf.edu ------------------------------ From: wet!dhl@netcom.com (Dahai Li) Subject: ps095, gcc2.1, and 2Meg Reply-To: wet!dhl@netcom.com (Dahai Li) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1992 18:45:25 GMT Hi H.J, Thanks for the good work on GCC2.1. I have gcc2.1 running on a 2Meg 386, with 4Meg swap space (it is painfully slow :-(), but it compiles 0.95a kernel, mtools, ps095 without much trouble, except make tends to give a segment fault after building one utility. So I just need to compile them one by one :-(). Anyway, about ps095. I followed somebody's suggestion to use gcc2.1's ctype.h rather than linux' ctype.h. I compiled successfully. But when I run it, the same kind of failure as before. It is possible that 2Meg RAM failed ps (rather than gcc2.1). I would like to hear some one who succesfully run ps on a 2Meg 386. I am going to try it on a 8Meg 486 later on, and see how it goes. Looking forward to seeing your ps patch. Regards Dahai ------------------------------ From: ramesh@utdallas.edu (R. Ramesh) Subject: Re: diskbackup -> broken pile Date: 3 Apr 92 17:36:38 GMT Reply-To: ramesh@utdallas.edu In article , zhao@unixg.ubc.ca (Jiansheng Zhao) writes: |> When I tried diskbackup with compress |> tar -cf - bin .. | compress |diskbackup "day one" |> I always got an error message: broken pipe. What might be the problem? |> I tried find | sort > list, the pipe seems working. Anyone has similar |> problem (bug in compress?) The problem is as follows: The disckbackup and restore assumes that a read of x bytes from a pipe always returns x bytes. But this is not true in 0.95a the read returns successfully even if it did read only y < x (y > 0) bytes. (and this is a commonly accepted and proper? behaviour) Therefore diskbackup and diskrestore are obsolete and need to be fixed before they can be used reliably(?) on pipes. I do have a fixed version (that I have not used extensively and hence can be buggy) available. Once again if there is enough interest I can post/upload it. BTW, the fixes needed are very simple. You just have write a readpipe function which takes same set of parameters like read but insists on reading x bytes by doing repeated read(.) system call. While you are fixing disksplit package you might also be interested in changing FLOPPYSIZ so that you fill you disk as much as possible. Good luck. Ramesh PS. read from disk files will get x bytes when requested x bytes (of course, unless EOF or EIO occurs) - RR. ------------------------------ From: drew@cowslip.cs.colorado.edu (Drew Eckhardt) Subject: Re: Any disk compression utility for linux? Date: 3 Apr 92 17:35:33 GMT In article <11767@tamsun.tamu.edu> tpradeep@cs.tamu.edu (Pradeep K Tapadiya) writes: >Howdy netters, > >In the DOS world, there is a great disk compression program, STACKER. >It keeps all the files in a compressed form, compressing/decompressing >them on the fly. My 65M harddisk reports 125M after using stacker. >Since my disk i/o is slow, the overall performance of my machine has >improved after using stacker. > >I probably can fit linux in another 30M harddisk I have. However, I wish >I could have some more space. Is there any disk compression program >which can be used with linux? > >Thank you. > >Pradeep >tpradeep@cs.tamu.edu Not at this time. You can however "pklite" your executables with a shell script like the following : #!/bin/sh WHAT=/usr/compressed/$0.Z if [ -f ${WHAT} ] uncompress < ${WHAT} > /tmp/$0 /tmp/$0 rm -f /tmp/$0 else echo ${WHAT} does not exist. exit 1 fi chmod it to permissions 555. Make symbolic links to the name of the file it replaces. Also, if you are a brave and hardy pioneer, and wish to be involved in the beta testing of gcc2.x, or can wait until the beta release (if everything goes well, it should be within the week), you can use executables compiled with shared libraries. With shared libraries, executable size drops by a factor of 2-4 for small executables (Extreme example : Hello World, from 25K to 5, typical example is by a factor of 2 for normal small utilities, 50K for a ~150K application like vile). Note that this could also be combined with the above shell script. ------------------------------ From: ak751@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Mark Saltzman) Subject: Experience with Elite Group or Pony 386/33 motherboards ($99!) Reply-To: ak751@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Mark Saltzman) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 92 18:01:28 GMT Has anyone ever heard of or used Elite Group or Pony motherboards? A kind of shady looking operation is selling them locally for $99. I would snap one up in a second if it can run linux and the performance is decent. ------------------------------ From: Guido Kueppers Subject: Disk formatting utility for 0.95a anyone? Reply-To: UPP200@ibm.rhrz.uni-bonn.de Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1992 20:21:57 GMT Greetings, there used to exist a format utility for 0.12 which I found rather useful. Has anybody tried to bring this to 0.95a? The old patches don't apply anymore, I think and I doubt that I have the expertise to fix it. Guido ------------------------------ From: moyerg@jove.cs.pdx.edu (gary a moyer) Subject: virtual memory problems Date: 3 Apr 92 18:34:31 GMT I have been having some trouble with swappping. I have a 2 meg machine. I have a swapfile of 4megs and it still seems that I run out of memory using make on a 27k source file. Is this right? Secondly, with swapping I run into trouble using zmodem file transfer. Although I cannot remember the exact errors from zmodem, I think its skips some bytes and gets a bad block error. Anyone else had that problem? Concerning swap file, how big should it be? I am using gcc 1.4 with either make or pmake (pmake is rougly 30k smaller). I figured that with 4megs virtual + 2 megs on board would be enough. Thanks. Gary Moyer ------------------------------ From: hlu@yoda.eecs.wsu.edu (Hongjiu Lu -- Graduate Student) Subject: Re: Help Mr. Fortran Date: Fri, 3 Apr 92 17:02:42 GMT In article <1992Apr3.142014.28253@ncsu.edu> jlnance@eos.ncsu.edu (James L Nance) writes: >r03.132049.116751@watson.ibm.com> >Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1992 14:20:14 GMT > >I remember reading a post here not too long ago from the person who was writing >gnu FORTRAN. I was wondering if this person, whose name I can not recall, has >considered porting FORTRAN to Linux. I would like to see if I can get Spice2g6 >ported to Linux, but parts of it (lots of it) are written in FORTRAN and >I think >it would be a Major job to translate them into C. > > It is MUCH easier than you thought. Grab f2c from research.att.com. Then you can figure it out yourself. > > > Thanks, > Jim Nance H.J. ------------------------------ From: tytso@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Theodore Ts'o) Subject: Re: Reduce "gcc is broken" postings, was:HD timeout Errors (with .95a) Reply-To: tytso@athena.mit.edu Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1992 21:00:34 GMT From: kxb@matt.ksu.ksu.edu (Karl R. Buck) Date: 3 Apr 92 06:55:26 GMT As an aside: I really think the compiler is fast becoming the biggest source of problems with Linux. It really is great that people are donating their talents working on the latest and greatest versions of gcc (first first 1.40, 2.0 now 2.1), but now there are rumblings on the horizon about 2.2 and a reliable (what I define as reliable anyway :-) is still a thing of the future. GCC 1.40 should be quite stable. GCC v2 is still in beta test, and so of course it is not quite as reliable as we would all like it to be. I wouldn't say that the compiler is "fast becoming the biggest source of problems with Linux." GCC 1.40 for Linux has been unchanged since version 0.10 or 0.12. - Ted ------------------------------ From: b645zll@utarlg.uta.edu (STEPHEN HUFNAGEL) Subject: new-user Date: 2 Apr 92 14:45:00 GMT I have finally gotten linux version .95a installed and sort of running on my 25 meg 386. I am having some problems transfering *.tar.Z and *.Z files into usable files. The machine uncompresses some of the files and writes some of them, but for some reason it falls flat with the binaries. Newgcc.tar.Z is one of the ones troubling me. The machine hangs before transfering any of the binaries. My machine has 4Mb ram + swap,with 24 Mb on the Linux partition, and 8 Mb for swap. Any suggestions would be much appreciated. I am a very novice unix user. My E-mail address is b645cse.zll@utarlg.uta.edu Thanks, bob ------------------------------ From: sergio@Ingres.COM (Sergio L Aponte) Subject: Since I haven't seen an FAQ... Date: 3 Apr 92 19:04:50 GMT Reply-To: sergio@Ingres.COM (Sergio L Aponte) Can somebody give me a two-three liner description of what is LINUX and what hardware it runs on? I have been trying to figure it out by reading the group, so far I got "FREE BSD for 80386 PCs". Is this the right track? Inquiring minds want to know... -- =============================================================== _|||_ Sergio L. Aponte, SMTS @ Ingres, an ASK Company <*,*> Internet : sergio@coqui.ingres.com [`-'] Keko UUCP : {sun,mtxinu,pyramid,pacbell}!ingres!coqui!sergio _"_"_ Jones ------------------------------ From: zhao@unixg.ubc.ca (Jiansheng Zhao) Subject: gcc2.1, no as (gas)? Date: 2 Apr 92 17:26:30 GMT I installed gcc2.1 according to FAQ in 2misc.tar. However, I can't compile 0.95a kernel with it (no problem for gcc1.4). It asked for as, cpp. What change I have to make to compile the kernel with gcc2.1. I know there are pioneers who have gone through all of this. (link cpp to /usr/bin ?) Thank you. ------------------------------ From: wcalderw@nmsu.edu (William A. Calderwood) Subject: Re: backspace doesn't work with ash: work-around! Date: 3 Apr 92 19:34:08 GMT >The no-backspace problem only happened to me in the first VC, and only >when using the floppy as root. I didn't think much about not having >the BS trouble, until I decided to boot with floppy as root again, and >it showed up. Anybody else see this? yea the same thing has happened to me. I guess the solution is to not use the floppy as root. Bill wcalderw@nmsu.edu maddness@sloth.nmsu.edu ------------------------------ From: jdough@unf6.unf.edu (Joseph Dougherty) Subject: .95a kernel panic? HELP Date: 3 Apr 92 19:55:49 GMT I managed to get through Iain Reid's superior directions, make some path changes, move some files around, and get the kernel recomplied to prepare adding in ps and lp. I did my recomplie to a floppy disk, and after rebooting, I get this message: 8 virtual consoles 4 pty's stac segment: 0000 EIP: 0008: 0000D262 EFLAGS: 00010202 fs: 0010 base: 00000000 limit: 000A0000 pid: 0, process nr: 0 8b 45 cc 66 c7 04 cd e0 a4 00 Kernel panic: Trying to free up swapper memory space In swapper task- not syncing I had to copt this by hand, so I believe this is exactly how it looked. I run from hdb1, which is set before the compile. I have 4 megs RAM, and have a swap to a 5 meg disk file run from my profile. However, this boot doesn't seem to get that far. I applied the patches in linus-95a-patches from tsx, but the problem is still there. If anyone has an idea of what the fix is for this, how about a reply? Shhot me something e-mail if you like. Thanks in advance. Joe Dougherty jdough@unf6.cis.unf.edu having frustrated fun.... ------------------------------ From: jrs@spiff.cs.hut.fi (Johan Rudolf Sundstr|m) Subject: Linux doesn't recognize my HD Date: 3 Apr 92 11:20:36 GMT Reply-To: jrs@niksula.hut.fi (Johan Rudolf Sundstr|m) Hi I would like to use Linux but it doesn't recognize my HD. I have a SCSI drive and I think it is an Adaptec controller.(The machine is writing something about Adaptec AT/SCSI bios when booting). I have tried following things: Metod Status bootdisk-0.95a.scsi Kernel panic: Unable to mount root fdisk No result at all fdisk.scsi floppy I/O error dev 021c 63222 blocks : No match pfdisk Can't read/write to dev mkfs Can't write to dev My HD is about 160 Mb and I have one DOS partition (60 mb) and two Minix partitions (50 MB resp. 50 Mb) made by edpart or part - I don't remember. I don't think it will be of any help but my machine is a ARCHE 386-25Mh Pro-file Could someone help me please? Thank You for any advice ;-) jrs@niksula.cs.hut.fi -- jrs@niksula.cs.hut.fi Skit happens all the time jrs@vipunen.hut.fi and then you marry one! d39139w@taltta.hut.fi ------------------------------ From: vandi@catt.ncsu.edu (Brian Vandivier) Subject: HD timeout Date: 3 Apr 92 20:35:48 GMT Reply-To: vandi@catt.ncsu.edu (Brian Vandivier) As I booted my computer off of the bootimage disk and after the question about the monitor, my system puts up the tty info and then I get several HD timeouts and then procedes to ask for the rootdisk and finishes booting. I log into as root and then do a fdisk and it shows my two hard drives and then I proceded to partition the second drive for Linux. After rebooting, I get the same HD timeout as I did before. After logging in I do an fdisk it shows a hdb5 partition with an error message. I did have success in installing on to the second drive. I used pboot to use hdb1 for root, and after when I used that disk to boot, I got the same HD timeout and then said it was unable to mount root. I attempted the samething on my 1st hard drive and got the same exact errors on it. I saw the post about getting HD timeouts while compiling and someone was making a patch for bootimage. Will this patch fix my problem? Both of my hard drives are ST-251 40megs I belive MFM, but I'm unsure. Thanks in advance. Vandi@catt.ncsu.edu ------------------------------ From: laefsky@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Ira M. Laefsky) Subject: Help with BOOTANY or PARTIT10 (not SHOESTRING) EMAIL RESPONSE REQUEST Date: 3 Apr 92 20:48:10 GMT I am trying to use bootany and/or partit10, two programs which claim to allow mutiple partition booting on the IBM PC (since I hope to I hope to use these with a derivative which does not provide a master boot record replacement Shoestring is not an acceptable alternative). So far in my experiments with these programs on a 386-25 with AMI BIOS and 2 IDE drives, attempting to boot a DOS_5 partition and a Coherent parttion I was successful in booting the DOS_5 partition if it was made bootable by inserting a 80h value in the partition table, I have had no success with the Coherent partion whether or not it was bootable. Perhaps this is a result of what these programs do when they cannot recognize the partion type field in the MBR partiontion table. Since I read that people experimenting with Linux have had similar experience I am asking for your help with any success you have had in working with these programs. Thanks in advance for any help, I would appreciate it if you can respond by email to: laefsky@eniac.seas.upenn.edu ------------------------------ From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds) Subject: Re: Help, can't compile 0.95a! Date: 3 Apr 92 21:27:41 GMT In article <03.04.92.020516.223@cogsci.cog.jhu.edu> wjb@cogsci.cog.jhu.edu (Bill Bogstad) writes: > > I have a 8 Meg system and also am having problems compiling fork.c. >I would have thought that would have been sufficient.... Ok, the problem isn't memory: it's gcc-1.40. For some strange reason the older gcc runs out of registers when optimizing some of the files in the linux source distribution, and dies. This one isn't the same bug as the "unknown insn" which was due to my hacks in the earlier 1.40 - this one seems to be a genuine gcc bug. Linux 0.95a is compileable with the older gcc if you just add the flag "-fcombine-regs" to the command line. In fact, the only thing you need to do is to remove a "#" from the makefiles: the line #GCC_OPT = -fcombine-regs should be uncommented, and gcc-1.40 will have no problems compiling the source. This was documented in some of the release-notes for 0.95, but I guess I forgot it for 0.95a. Why remove the flag in the first place I hear you say? Simply because gcc-2 doesn't understand -fcombine-regs, as it seems to do the optimizations even without asking. There are other things I had to change in the source to get gcc-2 to compile it, but this is the only problem that made the old gcc choke. With the advent of an official gcc-2.1 (this weekend?), people might want to change to that one: note however that gcc-2.1 is about twice as big as 1.40, so it's going to be slower on machines that swap... People with just 2M of mem might not want to upgrade (*). I like the changes to 2.1: the code quality seems to be a lot better (esp floating point). On a slightly related note: the as-binary in newgcc has been reported by several people to have problems. Getting as from the original gcc-distribution by me (gccbin.tar.Z) might be a good idea if you have problems with the newgcc version. Linus (*) Even with only 2M of mem, using gcc-2 has it's good points. The shared libraries should cut down on memory use as well as loading time and disk-space use. Shared libraries work even with 1.40 if you know how to build them, but 2.1 does it all automatically... ------------------------------ ** FOR YOUR REFERENCE ** The service address, to which questions about the list itself and requests to be added to or deleted from it should be directed, is: Internet: Linux-Activists-Request@NEWS-DIGESTS.MIT.EDU You can send mail to the entire list (and comp.os.linux) via: Internet: Linux-Activists@NEWS-DIGESTS.MIT.EDU Linux may be obtained via one of these FTP sites: nic.funet.fi pub/OS/Linux tsx-11.mit.edu pub/linux tupac-amaru.informatik.rwth-aachen.de pub/msdos/replace The current version of Linux is 0.95a released on March 17, 1992 End of Linux-Activists Digest ******************************