On Sat, 27 Mar 1999, Paul Clyne wrote:
> Good listers..
>
>
> I'm having a problem installing RH 5.2 onto a HP omnibook
4000CT
> (520M HDD, 8M memory). Your advice would be appreciated..
>
I doubt it, but it's free, and you will have it anyway. :-) I am not an
experienced RH user, but it seems to me that 8mb memory is very tight
for a RedHat install. I get the impression rh insists on a swap
partition, but if it doesn't, you will probably need to make and
activate one (mkswap and swapon). I admit I am a slackware bigot, but
if I had a notebool pc I wanted linux on, I would use slackware to get
it going. And I would use the text install root, not the color pseudo
gui one. In fact I would probably do it the same way I installed linux
on my mighty packard-Hell 386 with 4mb ram: I would make a tiny
partition with just the install root and kernel on it, then boot that so
I had the floppy free to install from, without using ramdisk. But you
probably don't have slackware ready to hand, so I will have to try to
see you right using RedHat. RedHat is good, and I am grateful to them
for coming down with both feet in favor of glibc, bbut they go out of
their way to make it easy for people with plenty of hardware and not
much sense, at the expense of those for whom the proportions are
reversed. :-)
> Be gentle with your replies, I'm a mewbie...
>
> I install the RH boot disk and begin installation, I need to
> utilize PCMCIA as the notebook doesn't have a CD, and I was planning on
> using a SMB share over my 10b2 network via the PCMCIA card (xircom
> CEM2).
SMB? As in samba? Here I am ignorant, but I think that over the wires
it is NFS, so probably you can do this, though perhaps not exactly as
you think to.
> So in goes the Supplemental disk..
>
> I get into either Disk Druid or fdisk but when I try and add
> partitions and continue the system sort of 'locks up'. It doesn't
> crash,
> but the floppy starts seeking something and it stays in that mode
> {until
> I power it off, I left it running over night without any progress}.
Why is it even accessing the floppy? Once you are into fdisk, the whole
fdisk program should be in (virtual) memory, and any accesses should be
to the hd. Are you somehow trying to fdisk /dev/fd0??
> The
> seek pattern is regular and sounds like a possible ramdisk/floppy disk
> swap or the disk has a bad track and we are constantly going to that
> bad
> track and re-trying.
>
> I have re-created both the RH boot and supplement disk
(rawwrite
> from the windows machine) so I don't think its a corrupt image on the
> floppy.
Don't be too sure of this. Rawritten floppies have absolutely _no_
tolerance for bad blocks. There is no provision for even detecting a
write error. If you have a linux system available, run badblocks until
you find a floppy with _no_ errors to use for this. I think the dos
equivalent is spelled chkdisk or scandisk.
>
> I have also tried to install by another method. I have been
able
> to successfully boot off a floppy with muLinux on it and use fdisk to
> partition (and mk2esfk {format ?}) and set dev/hda1 to bootable, BUT I
I hope that's a typo for mke2fs :-)
> have been unable to then figure out how to transfer a operating system
> (lilo ?) on it. and then I would need to get the PCMCIA devices
> working.. then SMB.. etc..
I am sorry, I don't know muLinux. It sounds like as much of a linux
system as you can fit on a floppy, but I'll have to guess at what
commands you have available to you. If cp or tar is one of them, and
mount another, perhaps you can do something like (/mnt is fairly
standard, but you may need to select some other mount point, or make one
with mkdir)
mount -t ext2 /dev/hda1 /mnt
cp -a -x / /mnt
or
tar -c[v][z]f -O -1 / |tar -C /mnt -x[v][z]f -
Then, if lilo is also one of the commands you have available, - I hope
you have some way to read the README with the lilo source. It is rather
lengthy, but worth reading - edit /etc/lilo.conf (if you have an editor
- even vi, in a pinch:-) and run lilo.
Failing that, from the lilo prompt of any bootdisk..
<kernel image name> mount root=/dev/hda1 _might_ get you started with a
minimal linux system. From there, you can probably install enough from
floppies to get it on to your network, then you should be on your way.
I don't think it is on the cd, but I'm pretty sure there is (in a
directory named code, near the top of the redhat ftp site), an
rpm-*.i386.tar.gz that should make it easier to install the rest of
redhat over the net. Sorry I couldn't be more specific, and I've
probably tried to lead you down some paths that aren't open to you, but
I don't know exactly what you're up against, do I?
>
> Does anyone have any {reasonably} simple ideas on how to
achieve
> what I'm trying to do ? I _really_ don't want to have to load W95 on
> this machine but my frustration level is rising (and time is running
> short) so it's starting to look more likely.
>
> Of course the best option would be if somebody was prepared to
> loan me a CD drive that was HP omnibook compatibe, but that might just
> be
> stretching the friendship... :-)
>
>
> Thanks in advance...
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Paul Clyne aka: PAC / PACMAN
>
> at work - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> at play - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> The future is in our hands. Which way to the future ?
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
Well, I hope that is some use to you.
"I just _love_ Australia" - R.V. Pepin
Lawson
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