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It took me nearly a day, but I finally got it running. I've got a 701C with 8MB and a 720MB hard drive. I also have IBM's PCMCIA ethernet card, so I decided to be different and try Red Hat's Linux distribution, v2.1. It supports installation over ftp if you have a supported ethernet adapter (including PCMCIA) and are on the Internet via ethernet. My first problems seemed to be memory related. Red Hat's installation requires at least 8MB RAM and an 8MB swap partition. I wanted to install a small copy of Linux so I could backup all the demo software that came with the 701. Catch-22. When will vendors start to ship large drives with two partitions? I couldn't get Novell TCP/IP for DOS to recognize the ethernet card, and I ended up accidently deleting most of the demo software. I gave up and formatted the entire drive. I noticed the external floppy was rather slow (3x-4x) at reading Linux boot disks (both Red Hat's and Slackware). After that, things went surprisingly smoothly. Red Hat's distrubution really does install via ftp. However, the ftp install doesn't give you the option to pick individual components from a series (I suspect the CD-ROM and hard drive installs do - they use an X interface), so I went with a minimal install of the basic and network series. I can always install the remaining components later, one by one via ftp. Avoid the dosemu series at this stage. It caused out-of-memory errors and hung the install. After Red Hat finished installing (the menus are friendlier than the Slackware distribution), it installed LILO, rebooted, and I got an "LI" before the computer locked up. I spent the last 15 hours trying to figure this one out. My configuration was a 250MB DOS partition, a 422MB Linux partition, and a 16MB Linux swapfile. I suspected it was a problem with the 720MB hard drive having more than 1024 cylinders, but none of the tried and true solutions to that problem helped. Eventually I figured it out - the 701's BIOS remaps the hard drive to <1024 cylinders. The Linux fdisk program will report 1400 cyl, 16 heads, 63 sectors, which I suspect is the true geometry. But if you run the dparam DOS program that comes with lilo, it'll report 699 cyl, 32 heads, 63 sectors. I had to give the boot floppy a hd=699,32,63 parameter, repartition, and reinstall, but it worked just fine after that. So if you're unsure of the disk geometry, grab the dparam.com and dparam.img DOS programs that come with lilo and run them first. If you don't get the geometry right the first time, your partitions will not fall on cylinder borders and you'll have to repartition and reinstall to fix it. Does anybody know what happens to those two extra cylinders at the end? Another reason I went with Red Hat is that their install scripts support upgrading - no more wondering what files are safe to delete if you install a new kernel or other software. I haven't had much chance to play with it yet, but it'll be worth it if this feature really works. Check out http://www.redhat.com if you're interested. Do some of you 701 Linux folks suppose we should put up a web page or something about our experiences? ___________________________________________________________________________ John H. Kim The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one jokim@mit.edu that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I have jokim@tuna.mit.edu found it!) but "That's funny ..." -- Isaac Asimov