Well, it seems people are starting to get some things working, and my
mailbox has certainly been busy.

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> Does linux work on a SX?

Yes. I've personally tried it, and there were no problems. It seems
linux works on all members of the [3|4]86-family. Knock wood.

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> How do the mtools programs work?

Urg. I fu**ed up. As has been pointed out, it is much easier to use tar
on a disk-image. Stupid of me not to think of that, even though that's
what tar is for. Even so, I should at least have done some kind of
readme for the mtools files.

If you want to read files from the DOS-partition, the mtools programs
should work. They need some setting up: you need to tell them what
devices A,B and C are. This is done by making the appropriate links to
/dev/dosX (X=A,B,C). A and B are assumed to be floppies or small
harddisk partitions, ie a 12-bit FAT. C is assumed to have a 16-bit fat.
To read a 1.44M dos-floppy in A:

mknod /dev/dosA b 2 28		# tell linux that A is 1.44Mb floppy
mdir A:
etc.

To read your DOS-partition (16-bit FAT):

mknod /dev/dosC b 3 1		# 1 partition on 1 drive: don't use 0
mdir C:				# as that's the whole disk, not one prt

12-bit harddisk partition:

mknod /dev/dosB b 3 1
mdir B:

Note that if you have a small partition, you probably have a 12-bit fat
on your harddisk as well, and you should use A or B for it, not C.
If you don't know what type of FAT you have, try with both B or C.
Note that A/B/C has no relation to the MS-DOS devices, even though
that's the normal way of setting it up.

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> Somebody had trouble, didn't even get a "partition table ok" with his
> IDE drive.

There /should/ be no trouble with IDE drives, so hopefully that isn't
the problem. One possibility is that everything works, but the
video-card isn't a colour-VGA. If you are using a mono-mode, the screen
map is elsewhere (I think, I'm not really used to the IBM video modes),
and linux happily writes to the wrong location. Thus the only thing you
see is "Loading system ...", which is written with BIOS-routines.

If this is indeed the problem, you should be able to test it by booting
up, putting in the root diskette, and pressing ENTER. Hopefully the
drive will run for a while, and then stop. Try doing something blindly
(write ls /mtools<enter>), and see if the floppy reacts. If the only
trouble is the video card, this will be corrected in the next version.

If it isn't the video, things are worse. Could the person please mail me
with more info (BIOS, type of computer etc)?

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> nic.funet.fi is unavailable. What can I do?

As you probably have noticed, there is now another site available that
carries it. See my .plan if you missed the message. nic will give you
the files eventually, but there has indeed been something wrong with it.

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> problems with gcc-1.37.1. Gives divide error (with the gnulib
> routine). Could the 16-bit object files be posted?

Arghhh.  I haven't tested the gnulib routines (as gcc-1.40 never wants
the divide/mutliply routines), so they might be buggy.  Silly me.  I'll
certainly post the 16-bit object files (they are only a couple of
hundred bytes anyway), and anybody should be able to get linux
recompiled within linux (after some makefile-editing, so that make
doesn't try to recompile the bootblock etc). 

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> ESDI drives, shoelace, DLD?

These I know nothing about. ESDI drives should work ok, but ...
Shoelace? Anybody? I don't know how it works, though I use it for minix.
About DLD's: if somebody comes up with a clever way of implementing it
all cleanly, and can explain it to me, I could certainly look into it.
Even better would be if somebody else wrote it from scratch :-).

		Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)