I'd like to share some of the experience I've gathered while attempting to install Linux RH 7.3 on a AST Ascentia P50 laptop (Pentium 133 MHz, 20 MB RAM, thanks for asking). It's probably from around 1997. And with laptops, as in laptops, nothing about its hardware is really standard.
This is a little story with a lesson in the end. Nothing more. No need to read this if you don't like my stories. ;)
So -- I bought the new little thingy a week ago. 300 NIS to someone who actually wanted to throw it away.
The thing is, that I thought that after six years, any recent distro would have this laptop for lunch. I couldn't be more wrong.
After finishing the installing RH7.3 , I realized that the PCMCIA cards weren't even turned on. Quite soon I could see that the PCI-PCMCIA bridge failed to insmod. Playing with the parameters did nil. Downloaded the most update drivers, read the doc, read the man pages, scanned the web, nothing helped.
In the beginning, the 82365.o module (the one who is supposed to work with the Cirrus PD6729 bridge) refused to admit that there is a bridge at all. After compiling the PCMCIA driver set myself, I finally got it to react to the bridge, but said "No IRQ known for interrupt pin A of device 00:13.0. Please try using pci=biosirq". But the module got loaded. insmod'ing ds.o, which is the next one in the chain, just gave me an oops (I've got its ksymoops, if someone's interested).
The reason for this is most probably the lack of IRQ routing information, which couldn't be resolved by the kernel in any way.
At this point, I learned a few things about IRQ routing, booted the laptop with every possible pci=something, played with the BIOS setting, tried all insmod parameters I could ever think of, got a hand of my machine's port & IRQ mappings, but really nothing helped. It was all oops. I read some kernel code, and in general I learned quite a few interesting things, neither of which helped me to get the PCMCIA working.
In the web I could find the right X-Windows configuration, but nothing about this specific problem. Weird, I thought.
And then it struck me: If noone complained, probably noone had a problem. Maybe the *old* kernels handled this thing better?
So I tried to boot up the laptop with a 2.2.15 kernel a la Mandrake. To my astonishment, it was just "service pcmcia start" and it all worked like a charm.
As for the real reason it didn't work before: I haven't investigated this further, but I strongly suspect that the some non-standard PCI/BIOS interface isn't supported in newer kernels.
LESSONS:
(1) A new kernel may not work well with hardware that an older kernel did work with
(2) For really old hardware, consider an old distro & kernel.
Since Mandrake 7.1 refuses to install with less RAM than 32MB, and it has some French ways of turning on the swap (which I failed to comply with), I went for a Debian Potato (2.2 r0). I warmly recommend installing Debian, just to get the feel of it. Debian assumes that the installer is an intelligent and competent individual, which might be wrong in my case, but it's really nice to be treated as a such.
Hope this will help someone sometime.
Regards, Eli
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