OK, hopefully this info will help someone somewhere =)
I have run a few installs/upgrades:
1) Dell Inspiron 7500 192M/15g, ATI 3D Rage P/M Mobility AGP 2x (8m),
3ccfe575ct (3com 3c575 CardBus NIC), Gold Card Global PCMCIA v.90 modem,
dvd/floppy module, 1400x1050 LCD display, Cel 466
First I installed on a spare 6g partition, originally used for windoze
variants for crash-tests, etc. The Custom/Expert install with everything
selected ran and booted fine, except for the following problems:
I had to copy a self-compiled XF86_Mach64 binary before X would
work without using the fbdev server. This binary was created using
a patch by <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> located at the following URL:
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~steveh/inspiron/XMa64-3.3.5-steveh.diff
This patch extends the capability of the Mach64 server to work with
this and other Rage Mobility cards. The normal XF86Config lines work,
except I added the following for 1400x1050 support:
Mode "1400x1050"
DotClock 220.00
HTimings 1400 1488 1904 2072
VTimings 1050 1053 1069 1102
Flags "-HSync" "-VSync"
EndMode
or if you prefer the old format:
modeline "1400x1050" 220 1400 1488 1904 2072 1050 1053 1069 1102 -hsync -vsync
Since many more people are installing on laptops it would be great to
get this into the distro. If you would like my binary let me know and
I'll put it up for ftp (the binary on steveh's site leaves out a few
things like XXA and ttf support)
The second try on this machine was an upgrade from Mandrake 6.1. I
was disappointed to find that the update first removed all packages it
didn't know about, so the only things left was custom stuff in
/usr/local. sgmltools seems to be completely missing, as well as
ghostscript. I can come up with a more detailed list if needed, but
looking at the system after 7.0upgrade got to it gave the impression
that the update process was removing everything. Wouldn't it be
better to only remove packages it knows about? This was also done in
expert mode, and I was not offered a choice of packages.
When the machine was rebooted my X config had been wiped, as well as
my network config, and all the entries in resolv.conf were commented
out. The 3c575 was not detected properly by the pcmcia utils bundles
with the distribution, I used pcmcia-cs-3.1.8 from my /usr/src
directory (about the only thing in /usr that wasn't wiped) then the
network came up flawlessly
2) Unknown Sagar laptop, 2g disk, 80m ram, unknown 32-bit video (assuming
NeoMagic or some variant), P-200
First I tried the Worlstation/Recommended install. The partition
process turned up the following:
10m /boot
995m /
995m swap
I would have done:
150m /
100m /var
50m /tmp
1540m /usr
160m swap
Do we all agree that almost 1g swap is a bit excessive on an 80mb
system =) We can get the ram from /proc/meminfo, seems it would make
more sense to double that and make it swap by default, and split out
/var so logs don't overrun the system.
After seeing the partition layout from the console while the install
was runing, I promptly killed the install and restarted with my own
partition layout, susing a Workstation/Expert install so I could
control the partition layout and what was going on. I was not offered
any package selection screen before the install process started, but
was asked questions before other steps in the install process. The
video card was probed successfully by the install process, and the
default resolution was properly maxed out at 800x600x32bpp. Network
is untested because there wasn't a spare pcmcia NIC immediately
availible.
3) Dell GX1p pIII-550, 256mb/10gb, 3c905 onboard NIC, onboard ATI
Mach64 variant video (not used but active) STB nvida agp video (active).
Same install problems noted above.
The only other known problem is netscape will completely lock up the
machine if 1) dns is not configured or 2) the site is not found
alt-sysrq still passes to the kernel but ping from the network,
ctrl-alt-bksp and ctrl-shift-f1 in an attempt to get a console are all
ignored. There are no oopses printed or logged.
Otherwise the installation looks great! Mandrake 7.0 is going to be the
_only_ distro capable of talking to laptop graphics cards....corel won't,
redhat needs extreme tweaking..
-dws
