Re: Slackware 8.0 partitioning tools.

[Kirk Wood <cpt.kirk@1tree.net>]

On Sun, 16 Sep 2001, Gordon Smith wrote:
> Hi.  The layout of my system is a little strange, this was necessary.  It is:
> Drive 1 = primary master
> CD-ROM = primary slave
> Drive 2 = ATA100 primary master
> Drive 3 = ATA100 Primary Slave
> Drive 4=ATA100 Secondary Master
> Drive 5 = ATA100 Secondary slave

And now we can solve a huge mystery. The following *should* represent the
drive letter vs the designation in linux:
1 - hda
cdrom - hdb
2 - hdf
3 - hdg
4 - hdh
5 - hdi

The first two are definately correct. But it is a certainty that your
drive 3 is *not* hdc. The reason SUSE is able to install is that it is not
making you specify the drive position. Suse was one of the first to
eliminate the need to understand a very easily misunderstood drive
designation.

Quite honestly, if you have a distribution installed, I would recomend
that you patch the kernel, compile and go on. I shied away from this task
for a long time. Then one day decided I had nothing better to do then
reinstall if I messed something up. The long and short is that it was
actually quite easy. In fact, it is so easy that I would recomend
everybody to compile their own kernel. Start with cutting out all the crap
in a stock kernel you don't use.

I have cut boot time significantly be eliminating the stuff in a stock
kernel that my machine doesn't use anyway. I cut it further by building in
things like network card support directly. Sure I made mistakes along the
way. I also found my own way of tracking what I have done. I discovered
that there is no need to name my kernel vmlinuz. I discovered that there
is no need to pout a softlink in the root directory to this. I discovered
that I can name my kernel to indicate the version number and date if I
choose.

You can find out a lot by playing here.

=======
Kirk Wood
Cpt.Kirk@1tree.net

The mind is like a parachute; it works much better when open.
If you're too open minded, your brains will fall out.