Subject: Linux-Activists Digest #14
From: Digestifier <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 3 Apr 92 18:15:36 EST

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: [email-masked] (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
[email-masked]

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (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                     [email-masked] (NeXTMail accepted)
Sr Systems Engineer            [email-masked]
Virginia Tech                  [email-masked]

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Michael K. Johnson)
Subject: Help, can't compile 0.95a!
Reply-To: [email-masked] (Michael K. Johnson)
Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1992 18:33:34 GMT

   From: [email-masked] (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
[email-masked]

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Dahai Li)
Subject: ps095, gcc2.1, and 2Meg
Reply-To: [email-masked] (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: [email-masked] (R. Ramesh)
Subject: Re: diskbackup -> broken pile
Date: 3 Apr 92 17:36:38 GMT
Reply-To: [email-masked]

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] (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: [email-masked] (Drew Eckhardt)
Subject: Re: Any disk compression utility for linux?
Date: 3 Apr 92 17:35:33 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (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
>[email-masked]

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: [email-masked] (Mark Saltzman)
Subject: Experience with Elite Group or Pony 386/33 motherboards ($99!)
Reply-To: [email-masked] (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 <[email-masked]>
Subject: Disk formatting utility for 0.95a anyone?
Reply-To: [email-masked]
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: [email-masked] (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: [email-masked] (Hongjiu Lu -- Graduate Student)
Subject: Re: Help Mr. Fortran
Date: Fri, 3 Apr 92 17:02:42 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (James L Nance) writes:
>[email-masked]>
>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: [email-masked] (Theodore Ts'o)
Subject: Re: Reduce "gcc is broken" postings, was:HD timeout Errors (with .95a)
Reply-To: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1992 21:00:34 GMT

   From: [email-masked] (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: [email-masked] (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 [email-masked]

Thanks, 
bob

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Sergio L Aponte)
Subject: Since I haven't seen an FAQ...
Date: 3 Apr 92 19:04:50 GMT
Reply-To: [email-masked] (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 : [email-masked]                                [`-']  Keko
UUCP     : {sun,mtxinu,pyramid,pacbell}!ingres!coqui!sergio       _"_"_  Jones

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (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: [email-masked] (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 
[email-masked]
[email-masked]

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (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
[email-masked]
having frustrated fun....

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Johan Rudolf Sundstr|m)
Subject: Linux doesn't recognize my HD
Date: 3 Apr 92 11:20:36 GMT
Reply-To: [email-masked] (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 ;-)

                                [email-masked]

--

   [email-masked]               Skit happens all the time 
   [email-masked]                   and then you marry one!
   [email-masked]

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Brian Vandivier)
Subject: HD timeout
Date: 3 Apr 92 20:35:48 GMT
Reply-To: [email-masked] (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.
[email-masked]

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (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: [email-masked]

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Subject: Re: Help, can't compile 0.95a!
Date: 3 Apr 92 21:27:41 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (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: [email-masked]

You can send mail to the entire list (and comp.os.linux) via:

    Internet: [email-masked]

Linux may be obtained via one of these FTP sites:
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    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
******************************