The installation process: painless



I chose to install Slackware 2.1.0, which was the current release at the time. The installation process should be clearly outlined in the package you are using. In my particular case, I installed from floppies, since I had no access to a CD-ROM.

Due to the relatively small harddrive in this machine (mine came with a 120 MB drive), I chose not to install things like XFree86, TeX, or some of the other things which seemed 'frivolous' at the time. I did eventually install XFree86, as I mention later.

The installation went well, and if you follow the instructions provided with Slackware (or whichever distribution you are using), you should be fine. Keep in mind that it's probably wise (from a data-security standpoint) to make at least two data partitions on your harddrive - this saved me at one point from having to completely reinstall. I've got two data and one swap partition: 10 MB swap, 30 MB '/' and 80 MB '/usr'. As of this moment, this is what df says about my harddrive:


Filesystem         1024-blocks  Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/hda1              29856   12734    15581     45%   /
/dev/hda2              79310   67730     7484     90%   /usr

And this is how I partitioned the disk:


Disk /dev/hda: 8 heads, 38 sectors, 812 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 304 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot  Begin   Start     End  Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *       1       1     203   30837   83  Linux native
/dev/hda2         204     204     742   81928   83  Linux native
/dev/hda3         743     743     812   10640   82  Linux swap

I did run into trouble, which was extremely hard to track down. I eventually found it in the memory module which was expanding my system to 8 MB of RAM. Installation of a new module seems to have fixed the problem. Nothing has gone wrong yet.

Michael Holve reported that he has expanded his 3600 to 16 MB of RAM with no trouble, using an original Toshiba upgrade card (possibly Kensington-made). I also installed a Toshiba upgrade, and the individual chips were marked with 'Toshiba' (as opposed to 'NEC' like my previous card).

In general, there should be few problems, as the computer seems to be fairly standard, as far as Linux is concerned.

Note on the T-3600: I haven't actually used one of these machines. My comments regarding the 3600 are based almost entirely on the specifications provided by Toshiba, and Mr. Holve's comments. However, they look remarkably similar, both superficially, and in terms of specifications. The major (only) differences between the two models seem to be:

They should react in exactly the same way, other than the differences outlined above. (Most notably, the 3600 is a more generally capable machine.)


This page was designed and implemented by Ian Johnston. Check out my homepage for a laugh...