Hi,
First up, many thanks to all on this list for sharing the results of their
efforts with the Inspiron machines!
On Friday night I installed RedHat 5.2 on my Inspiron 3200. Here's what
I tried and how I eventually got it installed. It's not pretty, but it worked.
Inspiron 3200
IBM DADA 26480 hard drive
Torisan DVD
hda1 : 2.0Gb W98
hda2 : 128Mb swap
hda3 : 4Gb ext2
enet : 3com 3C589D
PC card network install:
Did not work regardless of the setting of BIOS PnP; same problems as already
reported in this list.
Install from w98 partition:
This worked wth RedHat 5.1 but failed with RedHat 5.2 which could not detect the
directory
containing the RedHat distribution. I saw the same messages Karl reported
Unable to load NLS charset cp437(nls_cp437)
Unable to load NLS charset iso8859-1(nls_iso8859_1)
I made a new supp.img with these modules and used insmod to install them
manually. The
installer found the directory, and printed something about ``Scanning the
directory for packages''
but still failed to locate the distribution.
Eventually I settled upon the following (I'm recalling this from memory and it was
late,
so I apologise if I've missed something):
1. On my desktop linux machine I mounted the CDROM and made a compressed cpio
archive of the RedHat directory using
find RedHat | cpio -ovH crc | gzip -9 > /tmp/rh.cgz
(okay, so disk is cheap these days)
2. On my notebook, boot w98, ftp the rh.cgz to c:\
3. Boot from the RedHat installation, use expert mode, use supplemental disk,
answer yes to CDROM install. At screen asking for install or upgrade, type
<alt>F2 to get to the root prompt on the second virtual console
4. Make the linux filesystem
mknod /dev/hda3 b 3 3
mke2fs /dev/hda3
5. mount w98 and linux filesystems
mount -t msdos hda1 /w
mount -t ext2 hda3 /l
6. unpack the redhat distribution onto the linux partition
cd /l
uncpio < /w/rh.cgz
7. Reboot then install from hda3:/RedHat
It'd be great if someone could try building some new floppy images
using the latest kernel and PCMCIA modules; I have been running
linux-2.1.129 and pcmcia-cs-3.0.6 for a week or so now with only
minor irritations (halt no longer powers the machine off), but don't
have time to work on this.
Eoin
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