Okay, so not really wars. Many obstacles, though, and a little bit of swearing.
All I'm trying to do is install Linux on a Toshiba Portégé 3110CT. SimplyMEPIS 3.3 was provided by someone much smarter than me, so I thought I'd start there. It seems to be impossible to do anything anymore, though, without a bootable CDROM, which is a feature notably absent from the aforementioned laptop. I have a parallel-port attached CDROM. No can boot. So I bastardized a Win98 boot disk to add support for the parallel CDROM, added loadlin.exe v1.6c, and tried launching MEPIS on the CD (by launching, with the CD as the current drive, "a:\loadlin \boot\vmlinuz2 initrd=/boot.initrd.gz" (as mostly documented here)). Gasp! Excitement! Loading! Dots flowing across the screen! It's all so beautiful. Then the letdown.
invalid compressed format (err=2)-- System halted
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
Posted by Ken Allen at May 2, 2005 7:47 PM