The Weekend's Computery Stuff

[vakkotaur]

This weekend wasn't just the trip to Sioux Falls. I also tried to make some progress with a computer or two. There was some progress, but not as much as I'd have liked.

Friday night I downloaded the Gentoo Linux "universal CD" since it looked like that would be the best thing to put on the Armada 7800 and I could see how things went if I tried it on icelandic. I've tried a several Linux distributions on icelandic and haven't been too thrilled with any of them, so there'd be no loss trying this.

Saturday I tried it. It booted and seemed to find everything except the serial trackball, but this was all text and just the installer so the default to a generic PS/2 mouse didn't matter. What did matter was that I could set up networking easily and get sshd running and do the first part of the install remotely. It's intensely weird changing partitions with cfdisk remotely.

With the guidance of the on-line installation documentation I was able to get things set up to the point where I had to be at the machine. There's a point where a change from the initial installer to the actual install, though it's far from being truly installed, means the networking breaks. I kept going through the install instructions and configured things, telling the compiler that it had to deal with a Pentium MMX and nothing more, choosing kernel options, and such. I suspect I goofed somewhere here. I let the compile run overnight. Sunday morning I saw to my annoyance that there were complaints that some instructions were not understood. I wondered if maybe it wasn't an MMX after all, but just shut everything down and went to Sioux Falls. A quick check showed that it is indeed an MMX, so I'm wondering what happened.

Back from Sioux Falls, I figured I'd wait till jmaynard was back before doing anything more with Gentoo. He's installed it successfully a few times and maybe I just plain missed something that he'd see.

Instead, I looked for how to get the special partition that Compaq laptops need onto the "new" hard drive that didn't have it. I don't know how Compaq's site was about things, but HP's wasn't very helpful. As seems to be usual, it's faster to bypass the site that should make things easy and use Google to actually find things. A couple files were downloaded, transfered to shan since it looked they need DOS or Win9x to run. Fortunately I hadn't done anything more with shan yet.

With the SETUP and DIAGNOSTICS floppies, I thought it would be easy. It almost was. I had to make room for the new partition, which meant getting rid of the old partitions (there was no need to preserve them or anything on them). My first thought was to use the DeLi boot floppies. That was problematic, but eventually appeared to work. But even after supposedly changing partition information and writing it to disk, the laptop wanted to boot into the old Vector linux install on the drive. The old PC-DOS install floppies, or at least the first one, got put to use: fdisk /mbr After that, I could set things a bit better.

The DIAGNOSTICS and SETUP floppies do their job and make the needed partition in some intentionally unused disk space. I set things up, and find to my dismay (disgust, really) that the Armada still isn't booting from the CD. A few more things get tried, to no avail, when it occurs to me that perhaps the CD drive is broken or even just not bootable (could that be?!). Fortunately there is another CD drive. It's slimmer, but there is an adapter. Load drive into adapter, load adapter into laptop, and the thing boots from CD. I'm not about to start a Gentoo install, but Vector did work and so it's a Vector CD. The install complains that all the file dates are in the future. Oops, I forgot to set the clock. I set the clock to the actual time. This site is useful for that. It's the Timekeeping link on the left. I've used the site's listing of "Current UTC" a few times now. By then it was late and time to stop and call it a night.