Over the weekend, I've managed to put together some stuff which other

people might find useful.  First of all, I've managed to build GNU diff,

GNU sed, Larry Wall's patch and tr.  They pretty much built without

needing to make any changes --- the only real problem which I

encountered while trying to build them is that the configuration progam

which you need to run to build sed itself wants to uses sed to build the

Makefile.  Oops.  :-)
In any cases, if anyone wants to just snarf the binaries, they can be

found via anonymous FTP on TSX-11 in /pub/linux/binaries.  If you want

to submit some something Linux-related for the FTP site, you can put the

file(s) in /pub/incoming and send me a quick note describing what you

left there.
--------------------------------
I've made a quickie change to the tools/build.c program so that it can

optionally take a fourth argument which specifies what the root device

should be.  Add to that a definition in the makefile for $(ROOTDEV), and

customizing kernels for a particular system becomes a snap!  Since the

patch isn't that big, I'll include the diffs at the end of this message.
------------------------
Other comments; maybe I'm doing something stupid, but I can't seem to

get mtools to want to write a file from Linux land to MS-DOS land.  The

other way works fine, but when I try something like "mcopy foo.tar

c:foo.tar", the program just returns to the prompt without actually

performing the copy.  Another bug: if you do "mcopy c:foo.tar .", the

file which will be created in your directory will be "???.???".

So you can't just specify a unix directory as the target; you actually

need to give the name that you want in the directory or the name will be

unrecognizable.  This also happens if you try "mcopy a:*.* .".  Final

problem: the program will hang if the destination file already exists;

you need to control-C out of it when this happens.
----------------------------
Also, trying to compile RCS for Linux apparently tickles a compiler bug

...
[ message continues ]

Urgh. I should never have included the mtools package :-). The problem

is that the root-diskette filled up, and mcopy is just the front-end for

other programs. mwrite, which actually writes to msdos, didn't fit.
The only reason I had even those small mtools programs was so that linux

wouldn't be a closed system in the way the minix demo-disk is. I don't
All bugs are probably of my doing :-( I've hacked the machine

description to add the string instructions, and that's probably the

thing that wen't wrong.
Another problem with gcc-1.40 for linux is that it sometimes can give up

while optimizing. I don't know if it me again, but this time I think

it's the soft-float: gcc runs out of registers when optimizing. It

hasn't happened wery often, but it's very confusing when it does happen.

I hope 2.0 has a corrected soft-float, so that there is no need for

hacking on that too.
Re: file-system corruption: You were right. I think I've found the bug,

and will send out corrected "buffer.c" sometime today. Hopefully that

cures the problem. First kernel patch for this version: not too bad. I

haven't found the floppy driver problem yet, though.
And lastly: Everybody out there making changes to the kernel, please

stand by for the next kernel update... It will probably be in early

december, and I'd suggest you mail me any cdiffs for the kernel before

the end of november, so that I can try to incorporate them into the new

version. 0.11 will not be a major upgrade, just some minor fixes + the

ability to handle other screens than VGA. If things work out with

rename, that might be incorporated :-)
		Linus