[ale] upgrade

[Frank Zamenski]

I'm somewhat in the same situation at work. I've a Dell PII-300 WinNT box
with a CD-ROM, and a 'generic' P-166 dual boot Win-95/Caldera OpenLinux 1.3
box (yeah, high time to upgrade it, which is why I'm posting). Anyway, since
I've now moved away from PC desktop spt to becoming a newbie UNIX admin
within the company, desktop tech spt (my former peers and still good pals!)
said I could 'keep' the 2nd 'illegal' box with Linux, given I'm also in
training, but they wanted the CDROM back, the dirty ratz! :-)  I've
NetManage Chameleon97 on the NT machine, which also supports NFS. I've
successfully set that up and test-mounted an OpenLinux 2.3 CD on the WinNT
box with the Caldera box, but, I've stopped short of attempting an upgrade
because if it failed, I supposed it could hose my painfully crafted LAN and
inet connections, Nutscrape email setup, XF86configs etc etc. (Yeah, could
back them up, but....). I tried using Caldera's boot disk, and I rawrited a
modules disk also from the 2.3 CDROM hoping there'd be spt for NFS install
on it too. And there seems to be, as the boot disk starts Caldera's
notoriously easy install routine, but then gets to showing the modules
'loading' part, whereupon everything then quits without a prompt to put in
the *&^%# modules disk. Suggestions? TIA.

And why does a 'budding' UNIX guru use NT at all? Cuz at our corp, the apps
we have under 95 fatal out too often for my tastes, so running that stuff
under NT has spared me a lot of the grief of others in our company. Funny
thing is, all I really much use it for is Groupwise Email and Chameleon's
xterms into the UNIX machines, and for our Perigrine Service Center problem
and pcr tracking.

And finally, for benefit of and encouragement to the students on this list:
I knew very little about Solaris and AIX (we use both) when I applied for
this position. But the fact that I'd been here for two yrs and built up a
rep as a reliable and competent contract desktop spt tech, and got to know
the corps apps reasonabley well, along with getting to know many of the corp
customers from my numerous PC troubleshooting visits with them, and, VERY
importantly, could TALK with people of various corp positions and technical
levels at THEIR levels -- coupled with the fact that I'd played on and off
with **Linux** for several yrs now! -- sold them on giving me a shot at an
open UNIX admin position. They figured I had the interest, staying power,
and could transfer the Linux skills over. (And I'm also a 40-something
'ex'-petroleum geologist, and this is major vocation switch #2 for me. Pay
is good, and the work has been *very* cool so far!) Not preaching, not
blowing my horn, I just want to stress the importance of people skills as
well as technical skills in a career. Technical stuff obviously changes
quickly. People, strangely enough, don't, and stranger still, tend to have
longer memories than computers! <G>

BTW, the current Caldera box, even with various incarnations of Xwin and
apps running, subjectively seems to keep up with the faster NT box (wow,
surprise...).

Oops. Sorry for the long post. I really started out just needing some
assist!
Frank

----- Original Message -----
 From: Jeff Hubbs <Jhubbs at NIIT.com>
To: dean pinili <dpinili at yahoo.com>
Cc: <ale at ale.org>
Sent: Friday, November 19, 1999 10:18 AM
Subject: RE: [ale] upgrade


> Dean -
>
> This answer is far from authoritative but try this and see if it works.
>
> One install method is over-the-network via SMB (the protocol used by
Windows
> to do file and print sharing).  Try to share out the CD-ROM drive in the
> Win98 machine and see if you can get the SMB install to work.  The reason
> why I'm afraid it might not is that Win98 or your CD-ROM driver might
mangle
> the filenames (i.e., might not handle multiple dots correctly).
>
> If that doesn't work, if you have software for Win98 that will let it act
as
> an FTP Server (NetManage Chameleon is one example), then maybe it will act
> differently if you try a network install via IP.
>
> Another class of possible paths forward would involve working with the ISO
> image file (yes, a bigass file) from the CD.  I recall that there is some
> way you can do an install from an ISO file of a distribution CD using the
> loopback device, but I don't know how applicable that would be.  The "dot
> problem" from Windows 98 won't affect the contents of the ISO file.  The
ISO
> file might be useful if none of the network install options work; maybe
you
> could copy the ISO file to a hard drive under Win98, add that drive to the
> target machine, and do some sort of hard drive install that goes through
the
> loopback device somehow to look inside the ISO file (I'm really grasping
at
> straws here; this may be BS).
>
> - Jeff
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: dean pinili [mailto:dpinili at yahoo.com]
> Sent: Thursday, November 18, 1999 8:45 PM
> To: ale at ale.org
> Subject: [ale] upgrade
>
>
> hello to all,
>      I'm a complete newbie with Linux so please go
> easy on me:):) I would even be glad if you guys will
> lead me to specific documents related to my
> situation...
>      My case is this, i'm running a dual boot(Red Hat
> 5.1 kernel 2.0.35 and windows 98) in a LAN. Linux in
> this case is installed in a small partition (500 mb)
> for experimental purposes. I'm planning to upgrade to
> Red Hat 6.0 but unfortunately the only CD-ROM drive
> that we have is in another machine running Windows98.
> Is ther anyway that i can proceed with the upgrade???
> Downloading is not an option for me coz we have a very
>  slow connection here...
>
>
>       I optimistic that you guys will be willing to
> help a complete newbie.. I'm hoping that i can move
> this machine to the Server if I can convince my boss
> that Linux can do wonders...
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