Re: [rock-user] Install report for an IBM Thinkpad 760EL with i486 pkgsfrom 5th April 05

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Raphael Langerhorst" <[email protected]>
To: "ROCK Users Mailing List" <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2005 10:45 AM
Subject: [rock-user] Install report for an IBM Thinkpad 760EL with i486 
pkgsfrom 5th April 05


> 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.

Placing the line
    alias tridentfb off
in /etc/modules.conf (for modutils) or /etc/modprobe.conf (for module-utils) 
should do as well.

>> > [..] I also run the daily cron routine... [..]
>>
>> This is one of the places where 'ldconfig' is executed.
>
> hmm... the whole system can start up and you can log in with just the
> links for the pam libraries. Then you can run stone and cron and
> everything anyway. So maybe it would be just fine to add the symlinks
> for "just" the pam package and recommend in the install docs that
> cron should be run after installation - which creates all the
> symlinks of the other libs as well.

To test a newly created ROCK 2.1 distribution I usually install the packages 
on a free partition, chroot, run ldconfig and then set the password, which 
should be enough to make the system bootable.
When /dev and /proc are mounted in the chroot shell, STONE can be run as 
well, but that's not strictly necessary before rebooting. As far as I recall 
there are some warnings from depmod when executing the daily cron scripts 
this way because the running and installed kernels differ.

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

Nice to hear. I installed a home-made but default Crystal (Desktop) 
distribution on a PentiumMMX-133 machine with 64 MB recently and it was 
quite usable as well. Replacing the PIO-only HD with an UDMA-capable was a 
real performance boost, only the VGA supports just 640x480x4. Sadly some 
hardware broke (maybe the power supply again?) and I haven't had the time to 
fix it yet.
One problem was that the kernel with default configuration did not work - 
while booting from CD the screen turned black, maybe because of the 
compiled-in framebuffer support. So I put the HD into another computer and 
installed the packages manually, put the HD back and noticed the very same 
error. I think then I used a SuSE 8.2 rescue/install CD to compile and 
install a customized kernel. :-)

Regards,
    Stefan Fiedler