[rock-user] Install report for an IBM Thinkpad 760EL with i486 pkgs from 5th April 05

Hi all,

I promised Tobias an install report... so here we go.
Target host: IBM Thinkpad 760EL
Install source: 
ftp://iso.rocklinux.de/official/2.0-stable/pre-release/pkgs-20050405-generic-crystal_emu-486/

The original situation:
This Thinkpad model has one bay for either floppy or cdrom... and it 
can't boot from CD ROM, nor has it a network interface - yes, it has 
PCMCIA, but that is not working out-of-the-box. So the only choice is 
to get a small system on it from which I can access the CD ROM and 
install another partition.

I have set up a very small 10 MB partition on the Thinkpad that I 
ripped of from a PC, this was some time in 2004.
Additionally I had (at the same time) installed a 2nd stage ROCK on a 
second partition from which I installed a full ROCK Linux on a third 
partition, but this was not fully functional. I haven't done anything 
with the laptop since.

Lately I needed the laptop, so I wanted to set it up properly. Luckily 
I still had this minimal partition from wich I could access the CD 
ROM, and prepare the partitions as well as to install ROCK pkgs - 
well, after I got a "mine" binary from blindcoder ;)  (I forgot to 
copy that tool from the installed partition to the minimal system 
before preparing the partitions...).

I have tested many floppy images with various systems (FreeBSD, 
NetBSD, OpenBSD, SuSE) but none of them got PCMCIA to work for 
installation, so I couldn't do a network install (I have two PCMCIA 
nics).

THE ACTUAL INSTALL PROCESS:

Anyway, I prepared a swap partition (100 MB) and an EXT3 partition for 
the rest (1.9 GB). Then mounted the CD with the packages, the new 
ext3 partition and installed (almost) all of the pkgs with mine. Then 
chrooted into it, set the root password ... or tried to. All 
the /lib/libpam* shared objects had the .so and .so.0.77 extensions, 
but no .so.0 . I had to actually symlink the so.0 as well (I think 
three of them) to get PAM to work!! I experienced THIS issue 
previously when installing the packages manually (without 2nd stage 
install system). YOU SHOULD PROVIDE A FIX FOR THAT (provide the 
additional symlinks in the PAM pkg). Then I could set the root 
password and got back to the minimal system and configured GRUB 
(which used the minimal partition).

The first boot:

Then I booted into the new installation and found out (or remembered) 
that the tridentfb.o module didn't work with this particular laptop. 
All the screen output was rather useless.

Removing Trident Framebuffer:

No problem, booted into the minimal system, removed (renamed) the 
tridentfb.o module so it couldn't be loaded anymore, booted the 
installation again.

Basic Configuration:

Well, ROCK is really fast and straight forward to configure. Launched 
up STONE, configured some stuff, told the PCI configuration to SKIP 
tridentfb, I also run the daily cron routine... and some more (time 
zone, keyboard, language, runlevels,...). Nothing special.

Getting PCMCIA to work:

The problem: standard Kernels don't find a suitable IRQ for PCMCIA (it 
always uses 0).

Well, I actually DO wanted to have network working. I found this site:
http://www.slowcomputing.org/ssouth/gltp760xl/index.html#id2873636

Which meant: configure your kernel, remove PCMCIA support from the 
kernel and THEN install the pcmcia-cs package from source (I used 
3.2.8). This procedure actually worked. I now have PCMCIA support and 
can use ordinary network, even 100 MBit/s :) and since I have two 
such PCMCIA cards I can use this laptop as a 
router/firewall/whatever.
One thing to mention for kernel configuration maybe: I found an option 
for isa-pnp (or something like that) at least it had to do with 
initialization of isa  (the pcmcia bridge is connected via ISA in 
this notebook).

Full graphical user interface - running KDE in 800x600x16

Well, the X11 configuration was no magic as well, the above site has 
some info on that as well. Just set the Option "NoAccel" "True" and 
you get 800x600 in 16 bit - yeah :-)

I actually use KDE on that system, yes, running KDE on a 133 MHz 
machine is possible and works reasonably.


Getting parallel port to work:

I actually made such a minimalistic kernel configuration that I only 
used the basic modules for parallel port support. Uhm... this didn't 
work out, I think one has to select "support foreign hardware" as 
well. I haven't recompiled the kernel yet (only takes 3 hours!).


Conclusion:
Well, I am quite used to ROCK Linux already (used it for a long time 
until all my PCs and Laptop got infected by FreeBSD almost a year 
ago). Anyway, ROCK Linux is probably a good choice for this old 
hardware, it runs fast, doesn't need much resources, is and is very 
customizable. There were no installation quirks on the ROCK side 
except for the libpam* thing which sould eventually get fixed.


Best Regards,
-- 
Raphael Langerhorst, JID: [email protected]
G System, The Evolving Universe - http://www.g-system.at