Australian PC World - Linux and IDE CD-ROM drives

Linux and IDE CD-ROM drives

Tip
A couple of months ago you had a request for info about loading Linux from a young student from UTS. I've seen some useful replies in the current mag, but thought a couple of points should be noted:
1. Basically any CD-ROM drive faster than quad-speed will be IDE or, more correctly, ATAPI -- AT Attachment Packet Interface. SCSI drives faster than quad are available, but are twice the price.
2. With the "Slackware" release of Linux version 2.x, there may be a problem finding drives on the second IDE port. There is a utility available on the Net, called MAKEDEVS (in uppercase), which corrects this. With later distributions there are also MAKEDEV and MAKEDEV_C utilities, just to confuse the issue.
3. Sun's Internet site is now mirrored at http://sunsite.anu.edu.au which may give readers a better response than attempting to access the American site. This site supports both FTP and HTTP.
If it's of interest, the latest InfoMagic CD, August 96, gives Linux 2.0.0 installations. One nice feature of this, in the Slackware installation, is that one X-Windows manager gives a Windows 95-like interface, with multiple desktops. For people wishing to "play with"/use X-Windows, they would be advised to select a video controller card compatible with the drivers supplied. My favourites are S3-based controllers.
For people with Pentium systems, this release of Linux is much more likely to recognise the PCI components and compensate for such things as old, buggy PCI/IDE controllers.
The latest version also supports most networking protocols and many file systems, including VFAT, so you can read/write onto a VFAT partition without corrupting long file names.
- Philip Crawford

Category: Linux
Issue: Dec 1996
Pages: 174