Tuesday, November 02, 2004

IBM 486DX2-50, Red Hat 7.1 is up, finally!

I unplug the IBM 500M HD from the machine and plug it to a old pentium HP machine. This version of HP machine (HP Vectra VE P100) is very good, the cover is easy to open up, bios can auto detect the hard disk, this machine is very much better(in design) compare to many of their later version. (Don't know why HP always screw up in their later design, like iPaq PDA after HP4150). I plan to install through NFS, so I don't have to plug in the cdrom and Red Hat 7.1 just have 2 CDs, just copy to the server hard disk. Unfortunately the installer doesn't detect the 3Com ethernet card. I have a few card available(ethernet II, ethernet III), all is not detected by the rh71 installer. The cards are using 3c503.o driver which came with the CD, but the installer need something newer like 3c59x driver(eg. 3c590, 3c90x). I have no choice and plug the HD into a HP Vectra PIII desktop, finally the network card working and installation from NFS, just take about 10 minutes, and I have try about 2 hours earlier to get Red Hat 7.1 install on the IBM 500M HD(plug and unplug hd, nic and try different combination). You though is the end of the story? Not yet! When I plug it back to the IBM 486 machine with 16M Ram, it can't boot. Not enough ram to boot the kernel 2.4? Not really! I have encounter the problem earlier before. When you install it on pentium, the installer will choose the 686 glibc library to install, so it will not boot on 486! I found a 386 kernel too. So I replace the 686 kernel and glibc with 386. Don't forget to clean up everything in /lib/i686, and now it boot on the old IBM DX2-50 16M ram machine! I have a ESS1688 sound card, but not working and can't detect by sndconfig. This ESS1688 is Sound Blaster 16 compatible and not using the ess driver in linux. After try for some time I think the Red Hat 7.1 kernel may not include in the isa plug & play driver module(yes! isa too old!), may be I will try later. Is late and I am a bit hungry, have to stop and go back home.

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