Torrents galore...but has anyone actually tried it?

[Carl Lowenstein]

On 3/7/07, Sergey Tikhonov <tsv at solvo.ru> wrote:
> Thank you very much.
> Carl Lowenstein wrote:
> > I downloaded the whole thing, and have it now running on my Alpha
> > DS10.  What now seem like minor obstacles made it a 1.5-day project
> > rather than the two or three hours that it should have been.  One
> > should emphasize the necessity for a BSD disk label on the system
> > disk, and the necessity to delete partition "c" before letting
> > DiskDruid get its hands on the disk.
> I thought that having bsd type partition is widely known. :)
> Actually, automatic partitioning handles this problem more or less well
> especially if you had
> no partition at all.

I had a BSD partition table left over from many previous installations
on this Alpha, starting with RedHat 6.2 that was on the computer when
it came from DEC/Compaq.  I was not able to get DiskDruid to change
the partition sizes to fit with my more recent ideas.  Finally I wiped
out the first few blocks of the disk and started over again, using
fdisk to create a BSD partition table, and then DiskDruid to assign
the partitions to file system places.

Unless you really like having nearly all of your disk space in a
single LVM logical volume, stay away from the default partitioning.

> > There seems to be no way to do a text-mode install, and the
> > graphic-mode defaults to a resolution of 800x600, which my elderly LCD
> > monitor does not support.  It does only 1280x1024 and 640x480.  Works
> > fine in text mode.
> You had to boot from CD adding "A" flag to boot command. Like:
>  >>> boot <cd_device> -flags A
>
> It would get you to aboot (bootloader) prompt. There is "l" command that
> give you
> list of predefined boot configurations. One of them - do install in text
> mode (I used it during
> testing and had no problem. At some point it was only working option).
> The default
> boot configuration is "0" - gui install.
> >

This afternoon, mounting disk1.iso on my Dell server, I browsed around
and found etc/aboot.cfg.
- - - - - - - -
# Alpha Core Linux aboot configuration options:
#
#   0 - Boot the Alpha Core Linux installer using a 2.6 kernel
#   1 - Boot the Alpha Core Linux installer with kernel messages sent to ttyS0
#   2 - Boot the Alpha Core Linux installer in text only mode
#   3 - Boot the Alpha Core Linux installer in text only rescue mode
- - - - - - - -

That leads me to believe that I could have had a text-mode install by
>>> boot <cd_device> -flags 2

More news if anything else interesting turns up.  But since this
computer is about 20km away, I visit it in person infrequently.
Mostly work by ssh.

    carl
-- 
    carl lowenstein         marine physical lab     u.c. san diego
                                                 clowenstein at ucsd.edu