This is the current version of my MCC (Manchester Computing Centre) interim release of Linux. This is intended to install or update Linux 0.99 patch level 8, or to recover from disastrous problems (such as deleting your shared libraries). It installs a system using shared libraries based on gcc-2.3.3. All commands are linked with the shared libraries at release 4.3.3. The files you might want to read before you try to install Linux on your system, are: README This file; general information. README.install Step-by-step walkthrough of an installation. README.disks Contents of disks by packages, with sizes. README.fdisk Fdisk, disks, partitions, and related matters. BUGS+WARNINGS Problems and, if possible, fixes. The following files might also be useful: README.mtools What is mtools? Configuring /etc/mtools. README.tcpip Configuring the MCC tcpip package. I have not used these disks to install Linux on a machine with 2mb of memory. I imagine it may be a little difficult. If possible, if you have a machine with less than 4mb, being by doing mkswap and swapon. After that you should have no problems -- assuming you get so far. NOTE: see the BUGS+WARNINGS note in this directory for fixes to small problems which have not yet been corrected in the current release. WARNING: this is experimental software. It is fairly stable, but please be sure to back up any valuable files first. You need to get from the images directory the files *-UK.Z (for UK keyboards) or *-US.Z (for US keyboards). If you wish, you may also get the images misc (with gawk, kermit, and groff), comp1 and comp2 (with gcc release 2.2.2d, the Linux kernel source files, bison, and the extended file system commands), g++, and gdb. If you are creating the disks on a DOS system, you will also need rawrite or rawrite3 and gzip.exe or something similar; copies of these and of their documentation are available in the directory /pub/linux/mcc-interim/dos-utils at ftp.mcc.ac.uk. The installation of MCC interim Linux is described in the file README.install in this directory. This file also contains instructions for using the MCC boot and utilities disk as a recovery system, and for recompiling the kernel after installation. You may also need to read the files README.fdisk and README.tcpip. The fdisk program in this release may not be able to get the geometry of some SCSI disks. If you have any difficulties, you MUST enter the correct disk geometry explicitly. This is the geometry as it appears to the bios, not the physical geometry. This version of fdisk has a serious bug, which allows you to overlap partitions in certain cases. The overlap is detected by fdisk if you give the command 'verify'. Always do this before writing the partition table back to the disk. The installed system takes up about 3.5 Mbytes of disk space if you use only the utilities disk, or about 16 Mbytes if you install all of the packages. More detailed information about sizes appears in the file README.packages, which also contains a brief description of each package. Except for the source for the kernel, this release contains only binaries, help files, and (where available) man pages. The complete source files and patches used to compile everything in this distribution are available by anonymous ftp from ftp.mcc.ac.uk. In addition to Linux 0.99 at patch level 8, it contains nearly all binaries from: bash-1.12 file-1.9 less-1.77 shellutils-1.8 bin86 fileutils-3.4 lilo-9 svinit-2.0 bison-1.19 find-3.8 make-3.63 tar-1.11.2 brik-1.55 fsutils-1.6 man-1.1a tcpip.tar.z ckermit-5a-179 gawk-2.14 mount-0.99.6 time-1.4 compress-4.0.1 gcc-2.3.3 mtools-2.0-l textutils-1.4 cpio-2.2 gdb-4.8 netsrc-0.2 utila-1.5 diff-2.2 grep-1.6 patch-2.0.12g8 utilb-1.3 e2fsprogs-0.2d groff-1.07 procfs-0.61 utile-1.4 elvis-1.7 gzip-1.0.7 psmisc-3 wdsetup-0.2 fgrep-1.11 joe-0.1.5 sed-1.13 The installed system contains all the available man pages for the installed commands in preformatted form. The unformatted man pages are all available by anonymous ftp from ftp.mcc.ac.uk. After installing this version, you may wish to customise it. The following files should probably be edited: /etc/rc.local: This contains the command which sets your host name. Change 'linux' to the actual hostname of your machine. This is important if you intend to use tcpip. /etc/mtools: This describes your floppy and hard disks in such a way that you can access DOS partitions. The format of each line is drive letter (A, B, C, D), device (/dev/fd0, /dev/hda1, /dev/hda6), FAT size (12 or 16), and geometry (for floppy disks only). See the sample, or read the documentation that comes with the mtools source. /etc/passwd: If you wish to add a new user, edit this file. the format is usr_name:ID_number:group_number:comment:home_dir:login_shell /etc/lilo/config: This contains the command which controls what happens whenever lilo is reinstalled. You must give the command /etc/lilo/install whenever the system file (/etc/Image by default) is modified (for example, by the rdev command) or moved: LILO does not use the directory structure to find the file. /etc/lilo/disktab: If you have SCSI disks for which Linux cannot get the geometry, you must edit this file before installing LILO. /etc/inetd.conf: The services for inetd are commented out. You must remove the initial '#' before inetd will run any of these services (and if inetd is running, you must send it SIGHUP or reboot when you change this file). No other files should NEED to be changed. There is virtually no documentation yet other than the installation instructions. The source to this is in /pub/linux/mcc-interim/0.99p8 and its subdirectories. Please let me know of any improvements which could be made to this release. -- Owen A. V. Le Blanc Computing Centre University of Manchester LeBlanc@mcc.ac.uk