Boot bother, part 2
; I am trying to load Linux on a rather ancient Compaq Prosignia P1 with a I SCSI CD-ROM and a smart array controller. I have used the 4.60 smartstart CDs to erase the current set-up and prepare the system for Linux. I must say I was pleasantly surprised to see that Linux was a selectable operating system on the smartstart CD.
Hovvever, whatever I do, I cannot seem to get the machine to boot off the Linux bootable CD’s. Red Hat, SuSE and Mandrake 7.1 just seem to leave the “blinking” cursor in the top left and you are forced to reboot as the machine fails to respond.
Mandrake’s boot floppy made from the CD comes up a treat vvith TUX and the two options: either auto or manual loads. Both seem to start OK, decompressing what I imagine is the boot instructions, then brings up: “Boot Failed – Please change disks and try again”.
I am reasonably new to Linux, but not to computers so l’m not phased by having to do things manually, but this has me stumped.
Have you got any ideas?
Thanks for your time and I hope you can help me out.
Peter Morris, via email
W 11 İt seems like Linux is having diffıculty 1 finding your CD-ROM drive. As it is a 1*1 SCSI drive, the problem is likely to be the SCSI controller itself, rather than the
particular drive. Most Linux distributions will be able to auto-detect the SCSI device and use it, but this seems to be not happening in your case. İt may stili be possible to get it to work if it is a supported SCSI device, but you need to know exactly what it is.
İf it is supported, you will be able to force ULO to try and boot from it. Insert your boot floppy and vvhile LILO is loading press and hold Shift (or Alt /control) to get the LILO prompt.
Then you can supply kernel options, loading the nequired modüle. For more detail, see the SCSI H0WT0, The Installation HOWTO and related documents (the HTML HovvTos are on the CD in the /LDP/html/ directory). It’s diffıcult to ansvver this question vvithout your exact handware specification, but I hope we have managed to solve your problem.
Crypt for Linux
l’ve recently installed Linux on my home machine and I am stili trying to get familiar with it. After years of using Windows it is somewhat different to my usual set-up.
Hovvever, things have not been completely straightforvvard as I have encountered a couple of problems along the vvay – I hope that you are able to help me.
I dovvnloaded a .CRYPT file from the web and I have the passvvord for it, but l’m unable to decrypt it. The instructions say that you should use the UNIX crypt command and enter something like this: crypt passvvord < fılename.taf.gz.crypt I gunzip -c I tar xvf
When I type it in, I just get ‘command not found’. Would any of the Red Hat packages have the crypt command in (l’ve got Red Hat 6.1)? İf not, can I get a version of it off the web?
Unfortunately, this is not the only problem that I have encountered. When I try and install a package using the rpm command, I get the error message vvhich says “cannot open /var/lib/rpm/ packages.rpm”. When I look in the directory, /var/lib/rpm,
ANSVVERS | LINUX | 2 5
Installation
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