 | |
 | Distribution
|
| System
 | IBM ThinkPad A21m 2628-E2U |
| 700MHz Mobile Pentium III |
| 256MB RAM |
| 10GB HD |
| 14.1" TFT Display |
| ATI Rage Mobility M1 4MB Video Card |
| IBM 2x-8x DVD |
| Megahertz XJ10BT NIC |
|
| Installation
| I chose to reformat and install fresh as opposed to upgrading the 7.1
install because I wanted to make sure that there weren't any odd
artifacts left behind. |
| I used the expert installation mode. The docs seem to imply that
the loader (GRUB or LILO) may be configured to be installed in a
partition instead of the MBR for all modes, but I didn't test
this. If anyone does test this, please let me know what happens. |
| I used both fdisk and diskdruid for repartitioning. RedHat 7.2
wants larger boot and swap partitions. Disk Druid is pretty and
all, but a little weak. Although there is the option of forcing a
partition to be primary, there is NOT an option to force a logical
partition. I ended up creating my partition table with fdisk and
then going through again with Disk Druid to assign everything. |
| I stayed with ext2 instead of opting for the new ext3 format.
There is an ext2 driver for Windows that I want to try. |
| I installed everything in /
 | Although this isn't the best practice, it will hopefully prevent
me from running out of space in a particular
"slice". |
| This is my laptop workstation, not a server :) |
|
| X installed without a hitch. Fn-F7 switches between external,
internal, and both displays. |
| Audio seems to work just fine with the supplied drivers. |
|
| dosfstools
| For some unknown reason, RedHat decided to ship version 7.2 with
dosfstools-2.7-1. This version complains if there is a FAT32
partition defined in your mount table! During boot up, press ^C to
get past the whining, otherwise the system won't boot. |
| Install the version that came with 7.1 or get it from RedHat at www.redhat.com/swr/dosfstools-2.2-8.i386.html.
I had to remove the old version first and disable the dependency
checking. See Bugzilla
Bug 55001. |
|
| APM
| The default configuration wasn't very useful. Instead of
suspending, the system would go into standby mode -- which seems to be
turning the screen off. |
|
| To Do
| DVDs. Since this is a dual-boot system, playing DVDs in Linux
still hasn't been a priority. |
| Modem. Still don't use dialup much so this hasn't been an issue for
me. |
| Get a bigger hard drive :( This is becoming more of an issue. |
|
| Mysteries
| Is there a SpeedStep utility in the works somewhere? |
| Can the external display be ran at a resolution higher than 1024x768? |
| Why can't the firewall administration tool read the installed ipchains
configuration file? |
|
| Things that could be better
| Warm booting from Linux to Win2K does not work well. I'd guess
that some PNP settings conflict. |
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| Other links
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