response 113 of 257:

Apr 15 10:51 UTC 1999

I had some similar troubles with X and high-colour. after wracking my brain
over the problem, I discovered that for some reason, even after setting up
the SGVA server with XF86Config, that it was defaulting to using the VGA16
server. I finally cleared it up by installing the XSVGA server package, and
when it configured itself, it asked if I wanted it to be the default server.
said "yes" and it's been working happily at 800x600x16bpp. I'dlike to go
higher, but I don't think that the CT64300 VLB card that I have has enough
RAM to do that. KDE looks much better now...
and speaking of xearth, does anyone know of any clones of it for the Win16/32
platform. I've tried several other crappy world time proggies for Win9x, but
none of them do what Xearth or the KDE World Watch does.

response 115 of 257:

Apr 18 16:38 UTC 1999

Re. 113:  I'd tell XF86config to use the SVGA server, but depending on 
other settings, it would drop back to the 8-bit server.

I think the only chance of getting this worked out is if I actually 
show what's happening to someone who knows Linux/Xfree, and right now I 
don't know anybody who's into it in my area.

response 117 of 257:

Apr 19 16:05 UTC 1999

usually to your server:
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root  wheel  22 Apr  6 19:05 /usr/X11R6/bin/X ->
/usr/X11R6/bin/XF86_S3

response 119 of 257:

Apr 20 17:31 UTC 1999

        I dunno... that "conifigurator" thang was a wash for me too..
        Setup was the way I went as well..Go figure.

response 121 of 257:

Apr 20 23:28 UTC 1999

Yay!

response 123 of 257:

Apr 21 09:11 UTC 1999

Caldera 2.2 is supposed to be as easy as windoze shrink-wraps to install. It
's install program runs from inside windoze, including the x86free stuff. all
hardware is autprobed, sound suposedly works(!).  I'll know in a few days.
I've had good experience with caldera's 1.2 product, so I'm optimistic.

response 125 of 257:

May 4 11:39 UTC 1999

Gentlemen! One of the IT magazines i had  seen recently, gave away Redhat
Linux 5.2 CD with it's latest issue. And i got the idea to try and install
it. But i'm a bit weird case.....i'm on a network and the systems guys won't
accede to your requests to get it installed on your pc the direct way. And
when i read the Installation manual, I got pissed off about the danger it
might do to the Windows OS running already...since i can not take a backup
as the floppydrives are disabled usually. So if any of you guys can make
sense out of my need to get Linux installed on my machine...if there is a way
to do it with out major hitches..i would be thankful to you.
 I can ask the lIBRARIAN here , who has the CD to load it in his computer and
i can access it via the company net...that's themaximum  i can do...so if u
still have a way out ...please..help me.

response 127 of 257:

May 4 22:40 UTC 1999

The best way to make sure you don't trash your windows OS, is to install
linux on a separate hard disk.  With some care, you can even take out
the disk Windows is installed on while you're doing this, and if windows
isn't in the machine, there's no way linux could possibly trash it.

So far as the "floppies being disabled" - that sounds just plain weird.
It's possible that "floppy boot" might be disabled - if so, that's
something that you should be able to enable by booting the machine into
the rom bios setup program.

Another option might be to beg for some old hardware to install linux
on.  Linux will run fine on a 386 or 486 - machines which it would be
silly to install windows 95 or 98 or NT on.

response 129 of 257:

May 5 02:14 UTC 1999

You can do it.  You'll just have to be very careful to make sure you know
which partition is which.  What you'll probably want to do is *delete* the
partition you're replacing, and create two partitions in the resulting empty
space -- one for a Linux filesystem, one for Linux swap space.

The key here is to MAKE SURE YOU DON'T DELETE THE WRONG ONE.  :>

response 131 of 257:

May 5 17:57 UTC 1999

Either remove the battery from the MB or thre is sometimes a jumper on the
MB to clear the bios.  Find out brand/model of MB and look on internet.

response 133 of 257:

May 6 06:48 UTC 1999

Definitely, if you can't get some sort of official blessing to install
linux, don't waste your time.  It is likely that the reason your DP
people have disabled floppies, is because of fear of viruses.  Your DP
people may not be able to tell you this, because chances are that they
actually only have 1-2 qualified people who really know what they are
doing, and the rest are just preaching "the company line" without really
understanding the why.  Your DP people are probably also organized to do
their work "most efficiently", which in many cases means they don't
always listen good to external (ie, "customer" input), and may not be
prepared to deal with "exceptions" (ie, anything that is different than
what they think you need.)

If the major reason you are doing this is because of personal reasons,
and your company isn't willing to invest in your education (some are,
some aren't), then you may well have no alternative but to find your own
personal hardware and install linux on that.  One of the nice things
about linux is that it *does* run on low-end hardware.  In the US, it is
not uncommon for companies to simply throw away perfectly good 386's and
486's that would run linux fine, because they no longer runs anything
the company supports, and isn't valuable either to the company, or on
the public marketplace.

If you can interest your manager or other powers in the company in your
project, then you have a decent excuse to "do this officially".  If you
can get someone high enough on your company to bang on the DP folks,
this may be a trivial operation.  There are, in fact, perfectly
respectable reasons for your company to be interested in linux.  It is,
after all, a lot cheaper than MS$, and makes a dandy web server,
database engine, or can be used for a variety of other non-sexy jobs
that MS$ doesn't handle nearly as gracefully.  If you can find a
specific such application, and your company has any interest at all in
saving $, you may well be able "underbid" your DP department by showing
that you can do this more cheaply than they can.  This will work best,
of course, if you pick a project your DP department isn't particularly
keen on, but that other people in your organization do care about.  If
you pick a project your DP department *does* care about, or if they are
worried about being out-competed by you and put out of a job, they are
likely to underbid you anyways, and eat the costs, or can come up with
all sorts of other good reasons why they and not you should win.

In addition to picking an unappetizing project, and sounding as
non-competitive with your DP department as possible, you may also want
to consider picking unattractive hardware.  For instance, if your
project is at *all* interesting to the company, it may be easier than
you think to include a modest hardware budget in that project.  $4K may
seem like a lot of money to you, but it may be less than the monthly
electric bill for electricity.  Now, with that $4K, you could buy an
awfully sexy pentium /// system.  But you might be better off ordering a
sun system (solaris), or a power macintosh system (mklinux or darwin).
The thing is, the pentium system could easily be converted to run NT or
to play awfully nice games on the DP chief's desk, and they know it.
Even getting this machine from the loading dock to your office, without
someone putting in a bios password and installing "the standard" stuff,
could be tricky.  The sun or macintosh will be alien stuff to them -- if
they don't want to learn linux, they certainly won't be interested in
these other machines.  Chances are good these boxes will make it to your
office with a minimum of mistakes.

response 135 of 257:

May 7 05:29 UTC 1999

Two thinkgs you might want to get straight with your DP folks -- the
first thing to impress on them is that Linux is virtually immune to
viral attacks.  Not necessarily 100% immune -- but because Linux is a
protected mode OS, and has a real notion of user privileges, it's much
less prone to the problems MS has.  In addition, simply because Linux
isn't compatible with Windows, a windows virus is going to find Linux
most inhospitable.  If their major concern is viruses, then they
actually ought to be very excited about the possibility of exploring
what linux can do - in fact, linux can do SMB, file sharing, network
printing, and email, and it can do all of these things with less
resources than Windows NT, so it ought to be intrinsically interesting
to the DP folks.

The other thing to get straight with them is just how hard it will be to
reinstall Windows if you trash your machine.  The way most DP
departments try to set things up is that per-user stuff is *not* stored
on individual machines, but is instead stored centrally.  The local disk
on the PC is used to store the applications and other windows stuff.
There is some sort of central copy of a workstation disk image.  The
central file storage is backed up onto tape regularly.  If a workstation
trashes itself, a new one can be wheeled into place, installed in at
most an hour or so (from the central disk image), and the user can
resume work with their latest files.  A new machines can be set up just
as fast, and it is also possible for people to use workstations in other
offices, if necessary.  In some cases, there's no local disk at all, and
instead the machine is booted "from the network", and has only network
disks mounted.  These schemes are big wins for the DP department;
instead of treating each user machine as a special case, and sweating
blood if one of them blows a disk, they can do most things centrally,
with much less effort.  So, if your DP department does stuff like this,
trashing windows shouldn't be any big deal - it's just a special case of
the "blown disk".  If they can give you the details on how to reload a
system "from scratch", then they could let you worry about this if you
manage to kill windows, and save themselves that much more grief.  If
trashing windows *is* a big deal for your DP department, then they are
already asking for trouble -- on a personal level, a blown disk is a
relatively rare event, but on a company wide basis, if the company is of
any size at all, a blown disk will become almost a daily occurrence.  In
any event, if your company *does* treat each machine as a special case,
they really *ought* to have some means to back up machines, and restore
them from the backup copy.  If you can arrange to try to install linux
after one of the regularly scheduled backups, or if you can arrange for
a special backup just before installing linux, you really shouldn't have
any fear of trashing Windows, although you'll still want to be a bit
careful.

Also, one other thing, even if you can't find a complete separate
system, have you tried finding *just* a spare hard disk?  You might find
that quite a bit easier than a complete system, and it may be less scary
to install linux on a separate drive than to figure out how to shrink
the windows partition and add a linux partition on an existing drive
(although, supposedly, this is not hard to do.) A small IDE drive (which
should be easiest to get) may not give you enough room to install X,
sources, and man pages, but it's at least enough to give you a compiler,
shell prompt, and the basics of linux.  The more solidly committed your
company is to windows (instead of dos), the more useless a spare 100 Mb
IDE drive will be.  Something worth doing here is to see if your company
has a pile of "dead, dunno why" PC's sitting in the corner somewhere.
This is a good place to look for that 100 Mb IDE drive.  If your shop is
Windows-centric, you have good prospects of finding a 100 Mb drive,
because it's not large enough to hold Windows or otherwise be "useful".
If there are enough dead machines, you can also play Dr. Frankenstein
and swap computer components until you put together a live system.  That
is, if someone else hasn't already beaten you to this.

response 137 of 257:

May 11 17:48 UTC 1999

Of course your DP folks said "no" to you.  This is what they are trained
to do.  You are trying to convince the wrong people.  You need to
convince your managers.  Your DP folks will be trained to say "yes" to
anyone of sufficient rank.  What "sufficient" means depends on the
company, but as a general rule, figure out who has purchasing authority,
and proceed from there (power of the purse strings).  In any event,
don't proceed unless you can get someone to say "yes" who outranks the
project managers that would have to approve a disk restore should you
manage to zap windows.  If you can't do this, consider switching
companies.  If you proceed, and don't have sufficient permission, you
could end up involuntarily switching companies.

You have to be careful about partitioning for several reasons:
 (1) it's hard to redo later
 (2) if your partition tool allows you to overlap partitions, you
        may be able to destroy other data on the disk.
 (3) if you get something too small, you may run out of space.
        if you get something too large, you may be wasting space; less
        serious but still annoying.
 (4) a swap partition is backing store for your computer's main memory.
        I think windows uses a special swap file for this.  Some versions
        of unix also support swapping to a file, but in general, this
        is less efficient than swapping to a large linear partition.