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local installfest which distro?

Poll Results: Which Distro?

Poll expired: May 16, 2003  
  • 50% (6)
    Debian
  • 25% (3)
    Redhat
  • 25% (3)
    SuSe
12 Total Votes  
post #1 of 78
5/2/03 at 9:00pm
Thread Starter 
The local linux user's is holding an installfest.
They'll be helping out on the install, so Im kinda leaning towards Debian.

I've got an 8886.
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post #2 of 78
5/2/03 at 9:41pm
Of the three listed, I'd take:
1) Suse
2) Red Hat
3) Debian

But that's because I'm not a purist. Otherwise, it'd be Debian/Suse/RH...

-myrkat
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post #3 of 78
5/2/03 at 11:28pm
If you can get SuSE for free, that would be interesting to have. SuSE refuses to release ISO's, save an "evaluation" version.

So if you really want to try it, its 40 bucks.
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post #4 of 78
5/2/03 at 11:46pm
Thread Starter 
they're providing the media, however I don't know what versions.

lugor
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post #5 of 78
5/4/03 at 11:46am
beakmyn whats that link all about? It says that domain is for sale.
EDIT: The link got fixed
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post #6 of 78
5/4/03 at 1:41pm

Ummm

Even if Debian has its twists and is not LSB compliant yet, it is quite evident that being the true GNU/Linux could help an install fest. Debian installs from 3 floppies, the rest can all be network based. So if ya have the line no doubts...
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post #7 of 78
5/4/03 at 3:19pm
Thread Starter 
sorry about that link put .com instead of .org
I've done a redhat,mandrake install already nothing special. I figured Debian would be kinda different. But it looks as if the poll is leaning towards SuSe. What's SuSe got that Debian doesn't? Assuming it's not the evaluation version?
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post #8 of 78
5/5/03 at 4:05am
***mind change (although I never actually voted in the poll)***

give Debian a shot. You sound like you've had enough with the "easier" flavors of GNU/Linux.

Heh heh, I tried to install Debian a while back and had a heck of a time with it. If you get help with it at the install fest, at least then you'll have the experience of setting up a more difficult distro.
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post #9 of 78
5/7/03 at 10:10am
Thread Starter 
uh. Looks like SuSe has been removed. They're now offering only Debian or RedHat (ick).
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post #10 of 78
5/7/03 at 12:48pm
Then it's pretty clear that Debian would be prefered over RH...

Too bad, SuSe would have been nice (more polished, IMO).

-myrkat
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post #11 of 78
5/7/03 at 8:12pm
Thread Starter 
I decided on Debian as soon as I signed up just wanted to put a poll up and see what other had to say.

BTW can I steal the yellow R in your sig? I want to put on my Subaru. Then it'll be a Subaru Type-R , instant 50VHP at least.
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post #12 of 78
5/17/03 at 8:03pm
Thread Starter 
well that didn't go as well as I had hoped.

Everyone was drooling over my 8886 and asking what it was.
"It's the Cadillac of laptops, it's got everything except the kitchen sink!", someone said.

We started with Debian but the guy couldn't come up with a compatible video driver. We fired up XP and I showed him Laclasse's solution. His reply was we don't have time for that, so we switched to RH9.

Had to boot noprobe nousb nofirewire which completely went against my reason for attending. So now I've got RH9 installed with no usb or firewire, time to do some configing and kernal hacking.
I did get a free set of install cd's, though.

The guy was pretty impressed that I was running a ported version of blackbox as my xp shell.

All-in-all the installfest was geared more towards fresh windows converts not a semi-newbie who's installed half a dozen distros.

BTW, the reason they dropped SuSe was because the SuSe folks didn't get back to them in time with install media.

On to Gentoo!
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post #13 of 78
5/20/03 at 12:58pm
Word of warning on Gentoo, you will have to boot with noprobe from the live cd 1.4 r4. After that, make sure you choose the right USB controller and you should be set. There should still be a link to my config somewhere on this boards. Don't forget your hdparm settings, it makes compiling MUCH faster. The options I use are :

"-c1 -d1 -m16 -k1 -u1"
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post #14 of 78
5/20/03 at 7:04pm
Thread Starter 
I could use all the pointers you have on installing gentoo. I'm planning on blowing away the failed redhat and do a stage 1 gentoo install. I have a couple questions:

Were you able to get everything running?
tv, firewire, usb, nic, radeon?

I assume I'll be building the kernel any pointers?

I've got the Gentoo install guide, it worked pretty well on an old laptop unfortunately 2gig install enough for a stage 1 install with kde and I never could get my pcmcia NIC to work right. Hopefully things will go better on my Sager.

I plan on going over the other threads and pull out all the good parts in case I get stuck.
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post #15 of 78
5/20/03 at 7:22pm
Internal NIC - Realtek 8139too module
USB - UHCI
Sound - I use Alsa, put the string ALSA_CARDS="intel8x0" in your make.conf file and emerge alsa.

PCMCIA-CS never really worked for me. What I did was emerge the package to build the drivers and get all the config file, then I recompiled my kernel and all the drivers included with it for PCMCIA and used the "yenta-socket" module instead of i82365. That works great so far with my Orinoco wireless card.

emerge ati-drivers for the radeon chip after the initial install is done. I never messed with tv output, but the bttv modules load correctly.

Here is my kernel config. If you like, just save the file as .config and put it in your /usre/src/linux directory and build the kernel. This config is for the vanilla-sources.

emerge acme to get a nice little program that will let you use all the "Fn" functions painted on your keyboard.
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post #16 of 78
5/20/03 at 7:26pm
Also, if you have another machine running Linux, install distcc on it and your laptop and it can assist in compiling
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post #17 of 78
5/21/03 at 8:11pm
Thread Starter 
thanks for all the info.
Unfortunately the only other laptops I have are 3 old 166Mhz (they were free). so, I don't think they'll speed things up too much. But, one is soon going to make a really cool digital picture frame.
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post #18 of 78
5/23/03 at 12:41pm
Thread Starter 
Emerge has begun.

Ok since I know I'll be asking this later and I didn't think to save it before I began.

With RH I had Grub in the MBR but not thinking I lost my grub config. I get a Grub> prompt when I boot.

Can anyone help with the configuration lines?

dev/hda1 is XP
dev/hda7 will be Gentoo.
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post #19 of 78
5/23/03 at 2:37pm
Yeah, no problem.

You need to know 2 things, the harddrive you want to install Grub onto, and the harddrive that contains /boot.

Note that grub starts at 0 for its partitions, whereas the kernel starts at 1, i.e. disk 1 partition 1 in dev will be /dev/hda1 while in grub it will be (hd0,0).

First you point grub to the partition that has /boot/grub on it. In my case it was /dev/hda2 (first harddrive, second partition), so in grub-speak I ran this command:

root (hd0,1)

Specal note on this. (hd0,1) contains only the /boot filesystem. The rest of / is on (hd0,3). This is the way I have mine configured, but yours may be different.

After that, you need to tell the software to install itself on the 1st HD in the master boot record, run this command.

setup (hd0)

Provided that your have a /boot/grub/grub.conf file already on you HD, you should be able just type quit and then reboot.
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post #20 of 78
5/24/03 at 11:59am
Thread Starter 

Bork, Bork

Oh I goofed it all up. I think it's time to fdisk everything and start from scratch. I think it's because my boot partition is NTFS and has XP on it.

There's some data on the drive I want to get off but Grub is broken. It won't let me setup (hd0,0) or boot (hd0,0) gives a wrong partition type message.

Of course I didn't make a boot floppy. Suggestions for getting XP back up?

Current Disk Config

hda1 Boot Primary NTFS 5.2GB <-- XP
hda5 Logical NTFS 403MB <-- XP Swap
hda6 Logical Linux swp 500MB
hda7 Logical Linux ext3 5GB <-- attempted Gentoo
Pri/Log Free Space 4GB
hda8 Primary NTFS 24GB <--XP storage/misc
Primary Free Space 8MB

As you can see it's a bit askew

I'm thinking this
hda1 Boot Primary ?? 100MB <--Grub boot
hda2 Primary NTFS 5GB <--New XP install
hda3 Logical NTFS 500MB <--XP swap
hda4 Primary Linux ext3 5GB <--Gentoo
hda5 Primary Linux swp 500MB


What do you think? How would suggest going about getting XP back on there and then still being able to put Gentoo and let them live happily?
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