Subject: Need Help

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 96 16:31:30 edt

Hi! I want to become one of the enlightened, and start using Linux. 
I've downloaded the Dedian Linux 1.1, and made my floppies with 
rawrite2. 

I have no special partitions now. Win95 is just installed on the 
whole 853M HD. The Dedian instructions indicate that setting up 
Linux and Linux Swap Partitions are part of their standard 
installation, but, alas, I did not get near that point before I had 
trouble.

After I hit <enter> at the boot: prompt, a bunch of stuff started 
scrolling by. Having been warned about this by the instructions, I 
paid little attention until it hung. There were two messages, that 
seemed like error messages to me, still on the screen. The last(and 
fatal?) one was, "Aiee, killing interrupt handler." The other was 
near the top of the screen, and said, "unable to handle kernel null 
pointer dereference at virtual address c00004d7."

My computer is a clone with an Intel 486DX2 at 66Mhz, Phoenix Bios 
4.04, 24MB of xms ram, and a 853MB WD (E)IDE HD. I am likely to be 
able to answer other specific questions on what I have or have done.

Any help you might give will be greatly appreciated.

TIA,

Matt

---

From: Syrus Nemat-Nasser <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 19:05:59 -0700 (PDT)

> installation, but, alas, I did not get near that point before I had 

Hold it here.  I can't address the trouble you had with the boot process.
I suggest you look at the document "Installing Debian 1.1 from Floppy
Disk" in the hardware sections to see if that helps.  However, before you
try to install Linux, you must have a free partition on one of your hard
drives.  This partition will be erased, and reformatted into two new
partitions.  If you have only one HD, you need to do this first:  The latest
version of FIPS (free repartitioning program) can non-destructively split
you Win '95 partition if you have enough available space.  But, you must
backup your data if it is critical because you may lose it all!  Let's
say you've got 853M with 400M of data.  You need to defrag your drive so
all the files will be in the first half.  Now, you can use FIPS to split
your drive into say, a 500M and 353M partition.  When you successfully
run the Linux installation program, it will allow you to erase the second
partition and create say, a 26M swap and a 330M linux partition for your
root filesystem.

Once you've got your system ready, you should be able to install from one
of the floppy disk sets.  Note that when the first disk says 'boot:', you
can press the function keys for some help on hardware specific parameters
for the boot prompt.

Good luck, and keep trying.  Also, backup your stuff or risk losing it.
I've taken that gamble half a dozen times :-),

Syrus.

----------------------------------------------------------
Syrus Nemat-Nasser <[email-masked]>    UCSD Physics Dept.