Re: [MiNT] easymint step 1

["Brian J. Roland" <bjr@localink4.com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin Tarenskeen" <m.tarenskeen@zonnet.nl>
To: "MiNT Mailing List" <mint@fishpool.com>
Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2002 4:16 AM
Subject: [MiNT] easymint step 1


> I hardly can wait to see easymint working with my CT2B Falcon.
> But somehow I can't create the ext2 partition.
> I used HDDRUTIL.APP (from HDDRIVER 7.71) to set a LNX partition
> type id. But easymint keeps telling me that I don't have a LNX or
> RAW partition, and the installation process stops before it has
> begun. All this happens with the CT2b turbo switched off.
> The internal IDE HD has 6 partitions of (approx.) 1 GB each,
> and I'd like to have an ext2 partition on drive G and/or H.

I had similar problems on CT2b falcon.
I have a 20gig IDE drive, 10 1gig BGM partitions and one 10gig
ext2.  I used HD Driver 8 to set everything up.  I've also used
HD-Driver 7 since performing the EasyMint install and it works fine.

First let me say that the CT2b and HD Driver 8 don't get along to well
when it comes to SCSI on my Falcon; however, in an IDE only set up
it works VERY well.  Once I get the mint kernel booted, the SCSI works fine also
with HD Driver 8.

Try this, as it is what I had to do to get an ext2 partition that easy mint
would recognize.

First, use HDUTIL to set that partition to BGM again.  Initalize (zero) the
partition you want to make an ext2 partition.  If it asks you the sector size,
choose the 16384 option.

Now reboot.

Open HDUTILITY again.
Assign it as an LNX or RAW partition.

Next, you need to tell HD-Driver about additional XHDI Partition types (this is
likely the step you've left out).  Under 'advanced options' you should find a
dilologue
with check boxes for:
Install XFRB
Generic SCSI Driver (SCSIDRV)
Support for Phasewriter Drives in Mac Mode

XHDI Partition Types:  ___  ___  ___  ___  ___

If you labled your partion LNX, then add LNX in one of the blanks
beside XHDI Partition Types.  If you labled it RAW, then add that.

Now, reboot and try to install EasyMint again.
It 'should' work now.

Note, I had some other problems installing EasyMint on my CT2b Falcon.
Here's a posting I did awhile back about them, and what I did to fix it.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
I recently installed this package on my Falcon CT2b.
It's great!  Mint really has made some giant strides over the past year or so.

The same day I installed this package, I grabbed tinyfugue 4.21 sources and
using the included and unaltered unixmake file in the archive, it compiled
straight away with only one supposed function costing complaint like:

"NO gethostbyname() but that's alrite.  (Domain names will not be resolved)".

In the end however...despite this one complaint during compiling, domain names
are resolved as they should be (I don't have to resort to ip numbers), and the
client seems as flawless as it would be on any other platform ;)  That was a
historic moment for me in that it's the FIRST time I've ever had a run of the
mill unix distribution compile under MiNT without extensive hacking due to
unsuppored calls or libraries.

I also greatly appreciate the rpm concept.  It's nice to be able to install
things where they belong and have been tested by the package maintainer ;)

Another interesting plus.  HD Driver 8 (wich does NOT claim to support the CT2
in turbo modes) crashes and burns on my CT2 when trying to access a SCSI drive
in all cases EXCEPT when this mint kernel is installed.  An odd but interesting
thing to learn ;)  I haven't run extensive tests on the reliability of this, but
so far it works very well (some quick tests reading and writing a 16meg audio
file to and from SCSI devices).  I just wonder why it works with the later MiNT
kernel installed, but doesn't work AT ALL on CT2 TOS or MagiC.

There are some minor problems I ran into while installing this on my Falcon, but
with some paitent tweaking, all went well.

Problem 1:
The EasyMint installer the first time it is run does some very brief things with
the filesystem (I assume making mint and aes folders and configs,etc) and then
it reboots the system into a minimal mint kernel with the built in GEM desktop.
At this point the user is supposed to restart easymint.prg.  The catch is, the
filenames are forced to lowercase and doubleclicking on ANY .prg, .app, tos,
etc, does nothing but try to 'display' the file.  I fiddled around with this for
some time trying to get GEM to recognize the lowercase files as launchable
without success.  Also tried useing the 'open' dialog in the drop down menu.

My fix to this problem was to have AES 4.1 loaded by adding this line to the end
of the c:/mint/mint.cnf file.
GEM=c:/path-to/gem.sys
This desktop had no problems with the lowercase filenames.

There might be an easier way?  At any rate...it's something to consider in any
future relases of the package.

Problem 2:
I installed the package to a 10gig IDE partition.  The first time it didn't
work, so I deleted everything in EasyMint's log folder, reinitalized the
partition, double checked the HD-Driver XHDI settings, ran it from the top
again, and it worked.  I'm not sure what went wrong...but the second try went
without a hitch.

Despite these minor glitches (either by my error, or oversights in the package)
it was truly EasyMint, and WELL worth the time to install.

One thing that still bugs me about MiNT is that there still is not very good VT
emulation.  tw52 and tw100 really do NOT handle split screen scrolling well at
all.  Fortunately alot of packages out there bind to the terminfo well enough to
'work'.  Sadly, it's about like working on a dumb terminal compared what a
proper VT100, VT102 or VT220 terminal can do.  It's very common for me to run a
program and the colors get all out of wack and never correct, or things just go
the WRONG place on screen.

The X6 GEM Xwin server does a very good job at scrolling 'portions' of the
screen...but as far as I know, there is not yet an xterm client for MiNT
supporting color.  Even on nonscrolling apps, there is a noteable difference.
Run lynx on a really nice VT102 terminal sometime, then run it under
toswin...compare for yourself which is less stressful to the eye and brain.

More kudos!!!
Excellent work on the MiNT team's part!
Because of this EasyMint installation, I've suddenly aquired a desire to use it
more, and a list has grown of software to purchase or register for my Falcon
(such as Thing, Kobld, BoxKite, NAES, etc...).

Sincerely,
Brian

Good luck!
Brian