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Don Comes to Visit

Friday 3 March
My good friend Don Beaton came to visit last Friday. He used to be a Unix system manager with a large engineering consulting firm in California. His father had died recently, and he was up in British Columbia for the funeral. He took the opportunity to come by for a visit, promising to teach me some Unix commands.


I had been stymied in my experiments with Linux because the Jaz drive failed to finish booting. It would complain: "/dev/loop1 was not cleanly unmounted, check forced," followed by a long time of nothing.
"So much for a rock stable operating system!" I thought. Additional error messages indicated that Corel Linux could not finish its boot process because either the Jaz disc or a file was read-only. After spending some time with it, Don is able to fix it. He makes it read-write by using the mount -rw command.

[I have since found another workaround. Wait until Linux reports "Checking dependcies...". Then reboot the computer. Each time, Linux finds fewer errors. You may have to do this a couple of times until Linux finishes the boot properly.]

In the meantime, my son and I install Linux on a second computer. This one is a 333MHz Celeron with 64MB RAM and 1GB disk space available for Linux. Once Don gets the original computer up and running, we try communicating between the two networked computers. Don uses the ping command to see if Linux even recognizes the ethernet card (designated eth0). On the first computer, he could ping the card using the following command:
ping localhost
As an alternative, Don told me, I can use the default IP address for all ethernet cards:
ping 127.0.0.1
I am also able to ping the network printer using its IP address:
ping 192.164.0.254
But we aren't able to ping the second computer nor its ethernet card. After Don spends several tens of minutes working at the problem, I decide to visit Corel's Web site. I find a FAQ at http://kb.corel.com/kbdocs that describes the problem: Linux often does not automatically recognize an ISA ethernet card. The FAQ describes using the modconf command select the brand name. In my case, it is an Intel Ether Express, which, ironically enough, I got as part of the Windows for Workgroups package back in the early 90s. The modconf command's user interface reminds me of a DOS-based sound board configuration program. It works, and we can ping the card, as well as both computers.

We still have a problem, however: the two computers do not recognize each other automatically. After puzzling over this one, Don and I find we have to the Find Computer utility before one computer can see the files and directories on the other computer.

By this time, Don's son was getting sleepy and it was soon time for them to head home. Just before leaving, Don showed me the promised commands:
ls -R
recursively lists all subdirectories.
RALPH = "moo"
assigns moo to my name as a variable.
echo $RALPH
displays the contents.
env
displays the Linux environment settings.
man
is the Unix documentation (manual) formatter, such as man ping displays the docs for the ping command.

Next week, Part VII: Connecting to the Internet