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Well I'm no genuis when it comes to Linux. I'm a fulltime wrench turner with some aspirations to do the IT thing. I've been tinkering with Linux about two years now and discovered Mandrake early in 2000. I couldn't bring myself to go back to RedHat after that. My laptop is a Armada 7370 that I purchased on eBay. I deliberately went for an older model hoping to have good hardware support. I was not disappointed. At 233 mhz and 64 mb it's certainly no match for the gigahertz plus crowd but it is quite adequate. It came with a 4 gig hard drive but since I intended to dual boot I bought a 20 gig off eBay also. The Compaq drive came with a 24 mb "Diagnostics Partition" . I had downloaded all the appropriate software from Compaq hoping to create such a partition on the new 20 gig drive. After a couple attempts I gave up on that and went with a standard partitioning scheme. I downloaded and created a boot diskette that lets me access the BIOS setup utilities that normally resides in the diagnostic partition. I can boot from that and look at my setup. I just have to be mindful not to disable diskette booting. I have read where others have left the diagnostic partition on their original drive, being sure that Diskdrake doesn't delete it. And after finishing their installation editing lilo.conf and adding a line pointing to that partition. The LILO boot screen would then display Linux, Fail-Safe, Floppy, Setup. Nice huh? Not me, I carry my setup floppy around....sigh.
The 20x CD drive boots the Disk 1 CD and begins the installation routine. I selected the general categories and the option to select individual packages. If you are new to Linux the list of individual packages looks abit overwhelming. If you have some time, highlight them one by one and read the descriptions. It is truly amazing the number of applications that you get with a Linux distribution. Some of my favorites are ones I didn't know about until reading through the descriptions. My Windows partition is 7.5 gig, the remain space begins below cylinder 1024. I let Diskdrake auto allocate the space. I then went back and changed the filesystem type to Reiser. I came to appreciate Reiser back when I first started messing with Linux. As a newbie I would get myself hung sometimes and in bewilderment push the reset button. A real no-no with Ext2. Installation on the whole went quite smoothly. The video card was found and configured properly. For the monitor type select Laptop 1024 x 768. The mouse worked flawlessly. The sound gave me some troubles at first. the sound chipset is a ESS 1878, Kudzu didn't detect the sound chip though. Using sndconfig I selected the SoundBlaster module and after some tinkering and unfortunately looking at the sound settings in Windows changed the IRQ to 5 and sound works. Oh yeah! One major thing. On the reboot when LILO comes up, hit ESC, then type linux nobiospnp enter. For some reason the funky BIOS doesn't pass along properly to the kernel. Either manually edit lilo.conf or simpler, in the Mandrake Control panel in the booting options add to the linux and failsafe headings, nobiospnp to the append= lines. At the shell prompt run lilo to install the new settings if you manually edited lilo.conf . Mandrake detected the built in ISA modem. The cardmgr detects my Netgear FA411 ethernet card and loads the drivers. I have a bit of trouble with my home LAN and the laptop, Windows or Linux. The cabling is Essexx Cat 5 that I pulled and crimped connectors on myself. There must be just enough signal drop to prevent a connection. The prefab cable going to my wife's computer works fine with the Netgear as does the short prefab that I have hanging off the switch in the basement next to my SmoothWall firewall machine. Happy Hacking : ) |
