Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

On Mon, 8 Mar 2004, James Miller wrote:

> Preliminary report:
> 
> Couldn't boot at first due to an apparent IDE controller problem (it was
> probing for a non-existent disk, and when it couldn't find it, the boot
> process would abort).  I fixed this by adding hde=none hdf=none to
> boot.bat.


I was able to boot BL3 just fine on both Pentiums (PI and PII) with Win98 
DOS on them.  I read readme and noted that BL3 is supposed to work on a 
386 with 3M RAM.  We have one of those, which I got working with Arachne, 
Nettamer, and DOS lynx already.  But the hard drive is 30M total and I 
certainly do not have 25M free space on it.  Why do we need so much free 
disk space?  Our pentiums have C: and D: partitions - in the first case 
on two separate drives.

I have not tried X.  I am more interested in getting online.

I looked in /usr/bin and found microcom.  Typing microcom --help (or just 
microcom) results in the program telling me that ttyS0, 2 and 3 were not 
responding, and it sent at&f to ttyS1 but nothing else happened.

At some point I got some instructions to specify the com port with 
microcom -D/dev/ttyS1 but when I did that it crashed.  I had to reboot.
I will try this again after reading the microcom man page, which I just 
discovered.    This program is a nice surprise and I hope I can get it to 
work.


So I did pppsetup and tried to dial my ISP (so I could telnet to my shell 
account instead of direct dialing).  Dialed okay, but -- long pause -- 
pppd failure.  BL2 never ever failed for me.  But I got similar failures 
when mixing BL2 with the newer kernel, on a different computer (the laptop 
486).  I forget whether this was the message I got when using the proper 
ppp for the newer kernel - I can't tell which ppp is in BL3.  106K pppd.
Is there something I could do to adjust the timing to prevent this 
failure?  I am using the same ISP in which I got the failure with BL1 and 
the newer kernel, until I changed to the newer pppd, at which point it 
dialed okay.  


Not much point in trying the mail program(s) until I get pppd to work, but
Jim was asking where he could find a simple popmail program so he won't
need to read/write mail online.  I note that you now have better Help for
the mail writing program, and that the program itself is immensely easier
to use.  Thanks.  But I cannot get it to work offline.

mail  6 (Enter)  gives me a nice place to fill in To: and Subject: lines 
and write a message.
I don't see any way to fill in the From:  line.  

I typed 1 to 'configure POP3 and SMTP server' and got into some screen
that appears to be e3pi, with no instructions for POP3 configuration, and
used Ctl-X to exit, and now when I type 6 instead of the nice screen where
I could fill in To: I see 0/0 Term: 80x24 Pos=134595104 (etc.)
Is there a man page for using this configuring program?  
I exited mail and went back in and typing 6 again gives me the 0/0 Term 
screen.    Ctrl-C exits.  I repeated this a few times.  What did I mess 
up, and how?  (I can fix this by unzipping BL3-00.zip again).


X - can't get it to do anything despite having 32M RAM.  Do I need to 
unzip the swap.zip file first?  

I typed startx and chose 640 resolution by typing a, or A, and nothing
happened.  Ctrl-C exits.  startx puts me back to the Xsetup program (the
second time I tried to run X).  b/B also don't work.  The monitor only
does 640 (mono) so I won't try C.  Ctrl-C exits.

Thanks for e3pi, which seems to work well.

I see you have a 'man' program.  There are a lot of /man.*gz files for 
things like eznet, rxvt, Xvesa, pmail, and even microcom (which I ought to 
read as it tells you how to write a script). For pppd, readmail, and 
pmail.  I should have read 'issue' before getting this far, since you 
mention the 'man' command there. Nice surprise, thanks.  

I have probably done almost everything wrong that a dummy could do, but I 
will keep testing tomorrow.  

Thanks for the nice new bl and I look forward to getting it all to work.
Sindi