VanLUG Email Archive
First off, RH doesn't offer upgrade except for other RH issues (not
suprising), so I backed up all the goodies I wanted to save and proceeded
with a 'scratch' installation from CD.
Initial tricky bit: When running LILO, it appears that you can't hit F8 after
going through LILO to get the 'safe mode' menu up. That was kind of annoying,
considering that win98 has a nasty tendancy to make booting into linux act
very strange if done without a hard-reset. It worked on the second time
(fortunately... The problem seems to be video related for anyone curious).
So after booting into win98 and doing the 'shutdown - reboot to dos' thing,
the CD was recognized and RH5.1's "autoboot" proceedure took care of getting
everything ready to go. I was installing off of CD, so PCMCIA wasn't
important (hence no supp disk).
Everything went smoothly through the package selection, fdisking etc, but I
had all the partitions pre-existing (just wiped them out and installed
overtop). Real installations will probably find this stage more challenging.
The first problem came with the video subsystem. It acted a little strange
when I tried to back out of the X server selection. RH5.1 doesn't come with a
neomagic chip driver but one is available online at S.u.S.E., so I figgured
I'd grab that after the installation went through. I suggest just choosing
the generic VGA server initially. After installation I downloaded and
installed the Neo driver according to instructions, pruned some entrys from
XF86Config to kill some warning messages on startup, and it was happy. *NOTE*
the neo driver still seems to have some mouse issues, probably conflicts with
gpm. They seem to only really show up during heavy X<->console switching.
The next trick was network cards. I have a 3c595TX 10/100 cardbus pcmcia
adapter. Compaq 16xx servers use the CardBus technology for PCMCIA, which
isn't supported (alas) by stock RH5.1. There is an update available at the RH
site. It was a necessity to download that rpm and install it before pcmcia
services worked... it made things a little more difficult considering I had
no network to do it with. ;) Fortunately, I planned ahead and d/led the rpm
before doing the new install, and kept it in my backup area.
The problems introduced by the PCMCIA stuff will be that you won't get the
use of the automated IP configuration scripts during installation... it has
to be done after the fact. Nothing major, but annoying if you're not used to
the RH administration of things on a fresh install.
After all that was done, the machine was fully operational and was ready for
reinstallation of data. I also went and grabbed all the latest updates for
the services I was going to use on it: the latest glibc, kernel, samba,
netscape 4.06, etc. I would strongly suggest that if we're going to do a lot
of RH installations that we burn our own 'install' masters which have all the
latest up-to-date rpms to avoid some of the problems I encountered and
pre-solve potential security concerns for our future fellow linux users.
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| Rick Franchuk - TranSpecT Consulting |
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