Linux

When upgrading Mandrake, e.g. from 9.1 to 10.0, make sure you delete the old hdlist.cz and synthesis.* files from the previous release, and use urpmi.addmedia to add the new release media (CD) to your machine.Here is a list of commands to do that:cd /var/lib/urpmi/# Cleanup the old media for URPMI.# Note: You could delete everything, or just choose to delete the ones that are on the old 9.1 CDs.

I had Mandrake Linux 9.1 running fineon a Dell Optiplex PIII-550 Mhz. The system had a Mitsumi CDR-2801TEon hdc, running with SCSI over IDE emulation.When the time came to upgrade toMandrake Linux 10.0 Final, I booted up CD1 and it loaded fine, untilthe stage where it tries to access the CD and mount it. At thispoint, the kernel halted with the following error:Kernel BUG at drivers/ide/ide-ops.c:1005!

My history with UNIX

This article describes how I came to know about UNIX, and later, Linux.

Part of this is personal, documenting to myself when I started using each of the aforementioned systems.

Part of it is quasi academic research using digital archeology techniques to dig up old mails, search old files and directories, and try to piece together the sequence of events on how the above happened.

As per Linus advice, I contacted Ted T'so in March 1992 for getting Linux on Floppies. Here is the e-mail.

This email is one attempt to reach someone for getting Linux by an alternate way, other than FTP.We did not have TCP/IP at the time, and our connection was X.25, and we paid by the byte.

Email to Drew Eckhardt, who later wrote the SCSI drivers for Linux.

Reply to an email from Robert Blum about getting Linux.

The interesting part here was: how companies would not be interested in Linux since it is "public domain"!

This is an email to a colleague who was interested in Linux. We were swapping notes on itand how to best obtain it.The interesting part of the email, is that I forwarded a lot of info that I collected on Linuxto him from various sources.

This is an email to Steve Hanson regarding the Unix User Newsletter.

Log of my early Linux installation and upgrades. Should be interesting for the digital archeology aspects of it.