Re: [MiNT] Greetings!

[Maurits van de Kamp <maurits@bassment.nu>]

Argh, forgot to edit the to-field again. Sorry you got this message double
Jean-Marie, I sent it to you instead of the list the first time. :)

----x8 cut here

Hey :)

> 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!

The memory test isn't very good indeed, a lot of memory errors can go
undetected. However the amount of memory it tries to test is really
dependant on what you tell it (ie the dip switches), rather than the
actual amount. I would expect though that those imaginary 64 MB didn't
pass the test? :)

> 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.

True, it is actually BSD style startup. MiNT is historically based on BSD.
And for small setups, this can be preferred over SysV. But it's good to
have a choice. :) But unless I'm wrong, a complete SysV init suite is
already available as RPM? I'm not sure how complete it is since I never
tried it.

> You also get linux-like console output at boottime or runlevel switching
> looking like
> Starting apache: [OK]
> Starting nfs: [FAILED]
> etc.

That's Redhat-like, not Linux-like ;) (although most distributions copied
this approach). Don't get me wrong though, I like this style of output,
because it gives a clearer view on where too look for trouble in the large
amounts of bootup texts.

Maurits.