To those that wondered what it was like to get Linux running in those early days, here is a post I made in April 1993 (30 years ago this month!) to the "comp.os.linux" Usenet group trying to dual boot Linux and DOD on my new 486 PC with I think no more than a 80MB harddrive. (BTW a2,a3,a3 refer to the first 3 floppy disks you need after the boot and I think root disk to start installing)

Help installing Linux. 5/4/93

Hi, I,ve tried to install the SLS base system 99p6. I partitioned my 210 Maxtor drive to half DOS and then added a 15M /dev/hda2 (type 81 Linux,Minix) and 10M /dev/hda3 (type 83 Linux swap). After writing to the partition table and rebooting, I did a mkfs /dev/hda2 15504; mkswap /dev/hda3 4096; swapon /dev/hda3. After then running doinstall things seemed OK until it tried to start installing a2,a3 and a4. The system only looked at the disks for about a millisecond and then prompted me to insert the next one ( I was thinking, Boy! this installation is quick). Finally I got the prompt for formatted disk to make a boot disk. Thinking, I had finished, I attempted to boot this disk to no avail. Of course during doinstall I got messages such as "mv: command not found", "rm: command not found" and so forth. I am guessing that my /dev/hda2 is not mounting and hence the file system is not being transferred. I have been trying to dissassemble "doinstall" as most errors seem to be redirected to /dev/null.

One "error" I noted on booting is "WD8013 not found at 280 ". Can't the driver find my disk controller? I have a TMC 486/33 motherboard with a VESA IDE controller. Linux seems to be able access the disk because the partitioning worked and mkfs -c works the disk out.

Please help me out , I would love to get Linux up and running.