Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

On Fri, 26 Mar 2004 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> Sindi Keesan wrote:
> >
> > > > BL3-2 still had the non-working Xsetup menu on the first boot.
> > > 
> > > How is it not working?
> > 
> > No matter what key I pressed nothing showed up on the screen 
> > and nothing happened.  
> 
> I find that very hard to understand.  Xsetup is just an ordinary
> script.  Are you perhaps using your goofy keyboard?  Or a
> monochrome monitor?  Or have you modified (or added to) BL3 
> in any way?

no no no - this happened on 2 computers, both with Intel P54C cpus and 
popad bug but nothing else in common.  AT keyboard, color monitor when 
booting the first time on the second computer, only happened the FIRST 
time we used BL3 so nothing had been modified.

> 
> Where exactly is the script freezing?  Does it ask you what
> screen resolution you want and give you three choices?

yes, but then nothing happens when you press a key, any key.  I think we 
got out of it with Ctrl-c but the menu choices did nothing, even after 
pressing Enter.  Nothing appeared on the screen, nothing happened.  
On the second boot it all worked.  But now the mail menu problem has 
recurred, on the first of these computers.  Menu worked for a while, then 
stopped working at all, but when we switched to a second terminal it 
worked, and continued to be frozen on the first terminal.  

I am currently using BL2, can't check BL3 right now.

That computer may have a flakey modem - it disconnected me twice 
yesterday.  Another time it would not dial until I rebooted and gave some 
AT commands with Kermit first.  Would that affect the mail menu?

It also has a screwy partition table:

Partition Table for /dev/hda

            First    Last
 # Type     Sector   Sector   Offset  Length   Filesystem Type (ID)   Flags
-- ------- -------- --------- ------ --------- ---------------------- 
---------
 2 Primary        0  1270079      63  1270080  Linux native (83)      None 
(00)
   Pri/Log  1270080  1270142*      0       63* Free Space             None 
(00)
 1 Primary  1270143* 2544191       0  1274049* Win95 FAT32 (0B)       Boot 
(80)

Partition Table for /dev/hdb

            First    Last
 # Type     Sector   Sector   Offset  Length   Filesystem Type (ID)   Flags
-- ------- -------- --------- ------ --------- ---------------------- 
---------
   Pri/Log        0      659       0#     660  Free Space             None 
(00)
 1 Primary      660   666599       0   665940  FAT16 (06)             Boot 
(80)



FATAL ERROR:  Bad sigrature on partition table.


I don't know if this ERROR refer to our second drive hdb (used for DOS).

Notice that Win95/FAT32 is Primary 1 but is physically second, on hda1.
What is this 'free space' about?

Jim thinks he partitioned with Partition Magic but his memory is not to be 
trusted and he usually uses DR-DOS.

The other computer which had the Xsetup freeze has DR-DOS.
Should I check with fdisk?

The two without problems are MS-DOS 6.22 (need to reboot to use Xvesa, 
F5) and Win98 DOS with partitions numbered more normally. - hda1 FAT32  
hda2 FAT16 hda3 linux, listed in that order.


DOS settings can clearly affect SVGA and XVesa behavior.  But how would 
they prevent pressing a key from selecting a menu item, in addition to not 
displaying the result of the keypress?

In future we will try to partition all computers with PQMagic and make
sure the results look more normal before installing DR-DOS and linux.  I
have four computers to be set up - two Intel one AMD one Cyrix.


Today I am trying to compile BMV - bitmap viewer for ghostscript, SVGAlib
- with help.  This will give me one less reason to use X.  The author
explains that some computers just won't handle X, because of too low
memory (this was in 1995).  Would you be interested in setting up a BL4
with SVGAlib and no X, and links2?  Maybe it would work on some laptops
that can't handle X? You could include vga=ask, resizecons, screen, zgv,
maybe gs with just one font, bmv.  Without Xvesa, you might not need the
later kernel or pppd.  Links2-static worked without installing svgalib but
at lower resolution (800 instead of 1024 on our S3 Trio64) and I needed to
make my own vgalib.config for the mouse selection.  SVGAlib (or links?)
has built-in Cyrillic.  The later links2 from delilinux requires the three
libraries (jpeg tiff png) but is about 4M smaller executable.