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[MiNT] Greetings!



Hi everybody,

Just delurking here...

I have two things to contribute at this point.

The first is about memory. Someone posted a message last week or so about 
memory testing, and what other tools there are besides the boot-up RAM test. 
I would also like to know, because the built-in RAM test sucks. Here's why:
I installed a TT RAM board in my machine with a single 64 meg SIMM. The 
machine became very flakey and I got lots of memory errors, so I decided to 
swap the single SIMM for 2 of 16 mb each. Booted the machine and it told me I 
have 64 MB RAM! Removed one of the SIMMS (now 16 mb left), booted, still 
tells me 64 mb. Played around with the jumpers and got it to report the right 
amount (still is very flakey but it might be incompatble SIMMs).
This proves to me the built-in RAM test is not very good and doesn't seem to 
actually test addresses or something...

Secondly, I may have a small contribution to the distribution. One of the 
things I disliked about my MiNT setup was system initialization, because it 
seems a bit proprietary to me. To have for instance a rc.nfs and call this 
from a bootup script is not exactly SysV style startup.
So I have adapted some linux bootup scripts for my setup. I use init as the 
init program, which calls inittab for its runlevel, and then uses the rc 
script to start services via the /etc/rc.d/init.d/ startup scripts.
This also allows runlevel switching with telinit, where services that are the 
same in the old and new runlevel are not affected.
You also get linux-like console output at boottime or runlevel switching 
looking like
Starting apache: [OK]
Starting nfs: [FAILED]
etc.

I am also working on network scripts so that you could use ifconfig, ifup, 
ifdown, stuff like that.

If other people are interested I could try to create a rpm, but it would 
deprecate some of the current rpms. I think all the SysV init scripts could 
be supplied with the mintinit rpm, which is incomplete anyway because it does 
not include /etc/inittab. It would also use some of the files currently in 
initscripts, maybe some more, I have to analyze what I have done exactly...
;-)

A separate rpm could hold the scripts for on a system that does not use the 
init program.

Regards,
JM
-- 
There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those that understand 
binary, and those that don't.