Lilo on vt100
 

Hope I'm in the right forum here . . .

I'm putting together what hopefully will turn into a firewall/router using some leftovers parts:

AMD 486DX100
16MB RAM
500MB IDE
*monochrome* (vt100) monitor
(CDROM, floppy, keyboard & serial mouse too)
BIOS has Y2K compatible clock, but won't boot from CDROM

I just got done with a fairly pared down install of Slackware 8.1, and everything went fine using the vt100 monitor till I rebooted. Lilo seems to insist that I have a VGA adapter. I can't seem to find an option to use vt100. Can anybody steer me in the right direction? Is there a different boot loader I can try? Something simpler than Lilo? (Linux will be the only OS on the box)

PS - I'm pretty much of a newbie to Linux. Any help is appreciated.

You might try just booting from a kernel floppy disk if the kernel supports the video. I believe the "vt100" is actually a name to identify a DEC terminal. But I suppose you mean a monochrome TTL monitor. The video card would be an ISA with a DB9 female connector. A VT100 terminal would use a serial port to communicate with. Anyway, for the boot floppy, boot your disk set and mount your partition. Locate the kernel and then "cp vmlinuz /dev/fd0". That kernel should have the right partition setup for the root partition to mount. Unmount your hard disk and then attempt to boot from the floppy disk. For Slack 8.1 the kernel would be in the /boot directory of the partition, all prior versions it was in the root directory of the partition.

And welcome to LQ!

Hi. Thanks for your reply.

Yes, the display is a TTL monochrome monitor and not a DEC terminal - and the adapter is an ISA card (full length!) that I suppose conforms to the old MDA standard.

I can boot OK using the boot floppy that I made during install, but would like to learn how to boot it from /dev/hda1 directly. I guess I need to learn more about the boot process, in general. From what I've read so far, I think I need to get to "run level 3" (Is that right?). Is there some alternative to Lilo or Grub so I can just boot up without a "menu"? Anyplace you'd recommend I read to learn some more about the boot process?

Newbie - Brimming with questions, but slowly eeking out a few answers.
:-)

Take a look at this program. I really like it for many of the various options it contains. Even being able to boot a CDROM disk from the menu. It might support the mono monitor, unknown. It can be installed to the hard disk or on a floppy.

http://btmgr.sourceforge.net

Thanks, that looks like a neat program - especially the "boot-from-CDROM" feature. However, thier documentation says that:

". . . it's NOT an OS Loader; it's not a replacement for LILO or other OS Loaders. In other words, you must use LILO (or other similar programs) to boot Linux while using SmartBtmgr . . ."

Leaving me back with Lilo or Grub. Are you using this a different way? Maybe what I really need to figure out is how to make the "boot loader" do its stuff without the menu.

I'll be stumbling around again with this project later tonight and maybe have a chance try try this one. I might also take a peek at my PQBoot and/or Bootmagic docs to see if there's anything helpful there. I'll post something here if I figure out how to do this. Thanks for your help.

:-)

OK, I got a chance to play some more. I reinstalled Slackware 8.1 (doesn't take too long since I've got just a subset of 'a') hoping find see a different option somewhere. Well, this time everything boots up fine - the only difference (I think) is that I put Lilo to the MBR (instead of the partition). Maybe I just hosed it up the first time. Anyway, it's nice to be typing /forward/slashes again.
:-)