: Welcome to the true kernel headaches :-)
Yes. These are harder to cure than caffeine headaches :-)
: You're right; I've tried some days ago whether Arc drives may be
: accessed similar to UNIX block devices - et voila - it works though
: not documented.
I would expect it to work because they have to be able to format the
disk somehow. And there is only one arcinst program, not a dti one
and a tyne one, etc.
: So partitioning under ARC can really work (withhin the narrow limits set
: by some extremly buggy ARC implementations like the Magnum ...)
Yes. I wonder how arcinst even runs on that system :-(.
: What is missing is a port of termcap to Arc; then we could use programs
: like cfdisk for installation. Another program that might be interesting
: to be ported to Arc is an sash type shell with lots of builtin programs
: that recently has been published. Think it's name was mash.
I like it. There is a song over hear called the Monster Mash that is
old enough everyone on the planet should have heard by now.
: The sad fact that every Arc BIOS I've yet seen will turn writing a complex
: Arc program into a walk through a minefield. Even worse; Arc is bugged by
: design. There are all functions required to access and manipulate files -
: except a function to delete files. Btw. - the mines are (C) Microsoft ...
So rm becomes much harder :-).
All of this talk about install reminds me... I got a S.u.S.E. CD
offer in my email (for the ParcPlace OI giveway, no doubt) about the
time that Ralf put out root-0.00.tar.gz. I filled it out form they
had sent and dropped the "Yah, I'm working on Linux/MIPS and am
thinking of putting together a distribution for it, would you put that
on your CD?" Just to see what would happen (and at the time I was
thinking about this). It turns out they are interested! So if we
have a BOGUS or Debian distribution or something like them, then we
can be on their CD. I hope that I've not overcommitted us, or stepped
on anybody's toes with this. I think it would be way cool to install
Linux/MIPS off of a CD like this... Then again, I know someone with a
CD-R that can make me one off CDs from a tape image if it comes down
to it...
So that should explain my thinking about these things now... It just
might be reason enough to get a ZIP or Syquest drive so I can see if
my BIOS will grok ISO-9660 images on it.... Or even just another hard
disk that I can format via mkisofs :-).
For the moment, I'm going to finish up the cp and see if I can reduce
by boot times by 5-10 seconds. I know that doesn't sound like much,
but every bit helps...
Once I have that, I'll go ahead and try all the interrupt hacks that
Ralf and others have suggested...
Warner
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