VanLUG Email Archive
> I've got a Compaq 1680 laptop (K6-200, 48mb, 3gb hd, 13.1 active matrix
> driven by neomagic chipset). Until recently I had slackware stuck on it, but
> decided to put RH 5.1 on just to see what would be involved. Win98 is on
> another partition.
Ok ok. stop bragging. :>
> 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).
I ran into a rather nasty problem when installing a laptop with debian.
The laptop had a 3com 100/10, a aha15XX scsi card and external cdrom.
Clearly, I had to get pcmcia working before I could install(I know
I could've used windows to copy it to the hd but that would be cheating).
This left only floppy install(who said floppy installs are dead?).
Well it seems that the pcmcia pkg in the base debian was not recompiled
after they changed the install kernel. It was all kernel symbols mismatch
errors from then on out. It took me a while to figure this out.
I finally just recompiled a kernel and pcmcia modules and it worked.
I hope this checksum method is abolished in 2.1 it never worked and
never will.
> 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
VGA16 will work on just about any video card, if only in 320x200.
> 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.
A more efficient method would be to make our own base tarball.
I have had quite a bit of experience with this and it works great.
If you assume at least a 1023x768@60 monitor a vga16 vid card
101 keyboard ,etc installation takes the the time of untarring
and rebooting plus extra configurations(epsilon, usually).
Does anyone have a cdburner?
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|R Garth Wood | Sigma notation is for suckers!|
| | -R G Wood|
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