Initial Attempts

The original plan of action was to install via the external CD drive that I bought with the machine but it wasn't recognised by any of the boot floppys that I had created. Not to worry I thought, I've also bought myself a network card (a Netgear FA410) so I can install across my network via FTP, NFS or HTTP. Wrong again; I find out later that an additional piece of software is needed to initialize this card correctly.

Success at Last!

My final shake of the dice was to install from a DOS partition but I couldn't copy the CD over as W98 choked on the translation.tbl files on the disk - I guess these are something to do with the ISO filesystem (and would W98 be crippled to stop software piracy? Correct me if I'm wrong).

So I had to set up an ftp server on my workstation and copy over the entire CD using a Windows ftp client downloaded from tucows. To start the install it was necessary to run dosutils/autoboot.bat from the copied files at the DOS command line (on shutting down W98 tell it to reboot into DOS) and the installation itself was then straightforward.

Knocking it into Shape

Networking

My first priority was to get the PCMCIA network card running, as copying anything more than a couple of files across from my workstation using mtools and floppies was a slow and painful process.

I changed my /etc/pcmcia/config.opts file to that recommended by this excellent site but I found that even though the FA410 was detected OK and showing every sign of life, I couldn't squeeze any packets through it and I was getting spurious messages in my system log. A quick search on Google and DejaNews pointed me to a page where all was explained. The card first needs prodding with a utility that is provided as source, which you can then compile with a command something like:

$ gcc -g -Wall -ofa_select fa_select.c

It then works fine. So I amended the /etc/pcmcia/network script so the resulting binary is run every time the card is initialized.

X

Straightforward - the NeoMagic card was detected on installation and an appropriately adapted XF86Config was all that was necessary. I also enabled an external monitor by adding a couple of options which you'll see in the XF86Config in the "Device" section.

Sound

This works with the standard kernel supplied with RH6.2. If you're going to re-compile your kernel, then your best bet is to compile the ESS Solo sound option as a module.

Modem

This was relatively straightforward to get going. The modem is a winmodem but the good news is Lucent supply a driver (pre-compiled only, somewhat sadly), which you can get from www.linmodems.org. You'll need to dmesg | grep tty to discover what tty the modem is assigned to (should be /dev/ttyS14) and then you can make a symbolic link from /dev/modem to it (as a lot of programs seem to use this):

# ln -s /dev/ttyS14 /dev/modem

I set up my connection details using linuxconf. I was pleasantly surprised as to how easy it was to do - a few years ago you had to hack together a chat script, muck around with setserial and troubleshoot your connection with minicom etc....tell that to the young people of today, and they won't believe you ;-)

One thing I've noticed is that the modem and network card won't play at the same time, which seems to be as a result of the default route being set through the NIC. I might fix it.

Kernel Recompilation

All the above was achieved with the kernel supplied by RedHat. Unfortunately, what didn't work was power management, so when I had the time I recompiled and passed the config script for the kernel some appropriate options. This improved things but I was still getting crashes until I upgraded to kernel 2.2.19

PCMCIA CD-ROM

I eventually lost patience with the CD-ROM as supplied by IBM; I guess I could have got it to work with Linux but under NT it was a complete pain (support for hardware in that OS is very poor - and of course, it's impossible to debug) and I got another one from a company called Archos. This works out of the box with Linux and I can recommend it.

To be done...

IrDA hasn't even made it onto the 'to do' list as I haven't got any use for it.

Feel free to email me if you've got any questions or corrections.

I've now upgraded to a 2.2.19 kernel since I wanted some additional features eg: USB & a working serial port. Read how I did it.