Installing Slackware 7.1 on the IBM Thinkpad 365E

Scope: this quick run-through is just for those who want to install Linux on
an IBM Thinkpad 365E. I just bought one for $20 (!) and I wanted to put up a
page that would lend some assistance to anyone else who might be in a similar
situation. The one I bought did not have a network card in it, so installing
from a LAN was out of the question at this point. If your model has a card in
it, and you have access to a network, then go for the network install outlined
at the Slackware site. Installing from floppies was very time consuming
and a challenge, but hey-- you'll learn more about Linux by doing it. . .

(Note: this model does not have a CD Rom drive and will be essentially a
text-only machine until more of the OS can be installed through a network)

First let me say: Do Not try to install Zipslack (see
http://www.slackware.com/zipslack/ ) on this machine! You will have made a
bunch of floppies only to find out that when you reach floppy 15 that you get
a cyclic redundancy error. This has to do w/ MSDOS 6.22 not being able to
unzip 32 bit files. I recommend Slackware 7.1 instead. You will only be able
to install from floppy disk the A (mandatory set of 16 floppies) and the N
[communications set of 8 (but you can only install the first 7) floppies].

Before installing the operating system, you might want to make sure you have
the latest BIOS. . .

Download newest BIOS from IBM website: http://www.pc.ibm.com/support.
Extract .zip BIOS update file to floppy.

Insert floppy into laptop and reboot.
New BIOS will automatically be installed.

Now for the Slackware:
You'll have to make 23 floppy disks +boot disk +root disk.
I ftp'd to sites listed here: http://www.slackware.com/getslack/
downloaded the files to the hard drive of my desktop PC and then moved them to
floppy.

Make boot and root disks outlined here:http://www.slackware.com/install/bootdisk.php.

Insert boot disk and turn on computer.
At boot prompt, type:
boot:>ramdisk floppy=thinkpad

Got bootdisk w/Netscape, but had to use ftp for the color.gz file, since Netscape
would automatically unzip it into the browser and I couldn't fit it
unzipped to floppy.

Was able to ftp anonymously to ftp://ftp.cerias.purdue.edu/pub/os/slackware/slackware-8.0/rootdsks/
for the color.gz file.

color.gz file did not work on my machine, so I tried text.gz, from ftp://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux/distributions/slackware/ (nice, fast connection from Ohio)
I eventually realized that YOU MUST MAKE AN IMAGE OF THE COLOR.GZ OR TEXT.GZ FILE W/RAWRITE.EXE!
I wasted a ton of time before I figured this out (wasn't crystal clear at the Slackware site.)

The boot disk worked fine, but I still couldn't get the root disk to load.
I kept getting a kernel NULL dereference error (really ugly), even after entering ramdisk floppy=thinkpad
at the boot prompt.

Here's what worked:
At the boot: prompt, type:

ramdisk floppy=nodma

Huge thanks to this site, where I came across the ramdisk floppy=nodma option:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~greg/linux.html
http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/v2.4/doc/floppy.txt.html (nodma explanation)

After formatting the HD (I used 32meg for swap,400 for primary linux, and 300 for free)
You need to type "floppy" when prompted for where you will be installing from.

I came to the realization that Slackware 8.0 was not the correct version to
install on this machine, as it is not "Floppy-install friendly." I decided to
install version 7.1 instead, since it has the 'A' and 'N' floppy disk sets
separated.

Actual Install- I got a little nervous when prompted for disk 8 of the N
series, since I didn't think I was going to need it. I made one with a copy
of the smaller files from n8 and setup told me that a several of the files
were not there (i.e. samba, bind, apache, etc.) but it still went on w/ the
install (whew... I didn't want to start over & insert 23 floppies again!)

For the mouse, I chose IBM PS/2
Setup gave the option for GPM configuration, and said if chosen, the following
line:

gpm -m /dev/mouse -t ps2

would be added to /etc/rc.d/rc.gpm.

It said that if you have problems w/ XFree86 later (i.e. refuses to start and
complains that it can't open the mouse, that you need to comment that line
out. (or add '-R' to gpm and set up X to use /dev/gpmdata as the mouse device).

I said go ahead and load it.

Other things. . .
Not sure about the proper way for a non-root user to shutdown the laptop, I
found this page:
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Battery-Powered-3.html

which recommended editing /etc/inittab to shutdown -h, rather than shutdown -r
when a user does a ctrl-alt-delete. (But don't edit this file if you don't
know what you're doing or you could possibly make your machine unbootable and
that would make life not so special. . .)

Also see:http://www.freeos.com/articles/2701/ for more info.

After making any changes to this file, or when changing /boot/boot_message.txt
you need to issue this command:
shell> /sbin/lilo
for the changes to go into effect.

other sources:
http://www.durak.org/sean/pubs/ligs-slackware/node1.html
http://www.slackware.com

Jim Miller, November 2001
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