[ccoss] Re: Ideas for meetings
- From: Wendy Galovich <wegalovich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: ccoss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 20:23:27 -0500
My apologies if you get duplicates of this... the original went out with the
wrong return address, so I'm not sure if the list server will deliver it.
Hi Dave,
What you're describing is *exactly* how I got Linux first installed on the
Sony. I'd opened it to add a memory chip, saw where the hard drive was, and
thought, 'hmm, good time to upgrade from the W2K factory install to Linux'. So
I put the drive into an old Thinkpad to do the install, then put it back in the
Vaio, booted and let kudzu find the hardware differences. I've also used an ide
adaptor in a swappable drive tray on a desktop - did that when I installed
Fedora on it recently. I did find I had to do the pcmcia setup manually though;
I'm not sure whether that's Fedora's fault (kudzu not recognizing on first
boot) or if it was simply because there was no pcmcia hardware on the desktop I
used for the install.
It's not an immediate problem to do that a few more times, but I'd prefer to
avoid relying on that method long-term, if possible, for a couple of reasons.
It's *tiny*... tiny cables, tiny screws, etc. It's a mini-notebook with a 10.4"
screen and weighs less than 3 lbs, to give you an idea. It seems that it would
be pretty easy to lose screws or worse damage a cable, especially since
removing the drive requires lifting the panel in front of the keyboard, where
the touchpad is connected. So I thought it would be useful to be able to do an
install without having to open it up.
The Toshiba laptop is a slightly different problem. That one is still under
warranty, which would be voided if I opened it up. The CD drive works
beautifully most of the time; it plays, rips and burns music CDs without a
hitch, so I'm a bit skeptical about getting a hardware replacement under the
warranty (not to mention that I replaced the factory-installed OS). But when I
first got the machine, getting Linux installed was... painful. I tried at least
half a dozen times to get through what should have been a simple CD install
(RH9), and it would die 1/2 or 3/4 of the way through each time.
Three long nights later, when I'd finally gotten RH 7.3 installed instead, I
did some investigating - copying chunks of data from one of the discs, and at
some point every time, it would hang with a read error. As far as I can tell,
there was nothing wrong with the CDs; I'd used them to install on a desktop
without any problems. In any case I'd really like to be running something more
current, especially since 7.3 is about to become much less reliably supported,
at best.
What I've been able to find out so far about hard drive installs is the you
have to first put the ISO images on the hard drive. The manual that came with
the Red Hat boxed set says to then boot from the first install CD, key in
'Linux askmethod' at the boot prompt, and then choose the hard drive install
when the list of options is presented. The problem is, even when the ISO images
are in /usr/hdimage where anaconda expects them to be, it doesn't recognize
them. I have no explanation for that. At one point I even downloaded the ISOs
from the RH site - via a dial-up, no less - to make sure it wasn't a problem
with the images, and it still didn't recognize them.
One other idea that occurred to me was to try to add an option to grub to point
to the kernel in the ISO image. I'm thinking that I'd also have to specify that
it's in an ISO filesystem. I'm not sure how to do that, but assuming it's
possible(?), it can't be too hard... must research that. I will keep the group
posted if I find anything on it.
Wendy
On Sun, 28 Dec 2003 21:13:05 -0500
dave <dave@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> i know next to nothing (ok, nothing) about #1, so i'll just skip right
> over that one.
>
> As far as #2, if you have another laptop and aren't shy about swapping
> hard drives from one to another, you could install Linux onto a latop
> with a cdrom (or even a desktop with a mini-ide adaptor, i have one),
> then move the hard drive back to the laptop without the hard drive. Once
> booted on the target laptop, you'd then need to shuffle some modules if
> you don't have hardware recognition, maybe not if you do. I've done some
> of this with some spare machine and it usually works pretty well.
>
> As far as a bonafide HD install, I've not done that, sorry.
>
> dave
>
>
>
> Wendy Galovich wrote:
> > A while back Chris asked for presentation ideas for future meetings. I
> > realize this is a bit belated, but it is the first opportunity that work
> > and the holidays have allowed me... Anyway, here are mine.
> >
> > 1) Sound processing - what software to use, formats, etc. This is something
> > near and dear to my heart because as a fiddle player, I learn as much or
> > more by ear as from written music. This is a topic I might be willing to
> > present (gasp), but it would take a few months to put it together. I would
> > like to have an opportunity to fully explore Ardour before doing this
> > (Ardour is at http://ardour.sourceforge.net, for anyone who's curious).
> > Also, I need to be able to do a major upgrade on my Toshiba in order to do
> > this presentation, which makes it somewhat dependent on my second
> > suggestion:
> >
> > 2) A how-to presentation on installing Linux from the hard drive, from
> > someone who has done it and knows what the pitfalls are. I have yet to do
> > this successfully am not sure what I'm doing incorrectly. I have two
> > laptops where I could really use this - a Toshiba with no floppy drive and
> > a somewhat flaky CD drive, and a Sony Vaio in which everything is
> > peripheral through either PCMCIA or USB connections, and which persistently
> > ignores the BIOS setting to boot from CD or floppy.
> >
> > Wendy
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