[CLUE-Tech] Upgrading to Red Hat V7.2 - Experiences?

jimintriglia at americanisp.net jimintriglia at americanisp.net
Fri Nov 23 08:20:41 MST 2001


Greetings,

I recently purchased the Red Hat V7.2 boxed package, to upgrade two of my PC
systems that are running Red Hat V7.0. A few surprises awaited me.

With respect to my Dell 200MHz MMX Pentium I PC, I could not boot of the RH V7.2
Binary CD *at all*. Red Hat Tech Support tells me that my CD-ROM drive is 'too
old', with respect to the PC's refusal to boot off of the Red Hat upgrade CD-ROM
(Binary CD#1). 

Their work-around was to create a bootable floppy disk containing device-drivers
for PCs with 'Old CD-ROM drives'. Using a boot floppy with the RH7.2 boot image
(boot.img), I would be able to boot into the RH V7.2 install/upgrade screen, and
then insert the "old cdrom driver" disk during the upgrade process, to upgrade
this Dell PC.

Problem is that this Dell displays a boot error message when attempting to boot
off the RH7.2 boot floppy disk. The boot disk is OK, as my other RH V7.0 PC (A
Penguin Computer Pentium II 400Mhz) boots fine of this boot f/disk.

Red Hat support tells me that *this problem* is due to a change in the 2.4.x
kernel, that prevents some PCs from booting off large image files(??) as well as
booting at all from older PCs that have "old CD-ROM drives. Their last
suggestion was to buy a new CD-ROM drive or submit a bug report. 
I went through this song and dance with my other Dell 133Mhz PC (Red Hat V7.1
would not install on PC's with less that 132Mb RAM, which was not the case with
Red Hat 7.0, which was happy with the meager 64KB of RAM on this PC). Seems that
Red Hat is fast becoming a distro that will not run on anything but
PCs/Workstations that are not older than two years or so.
Suggestions toward resolving this problem in upgrading this Dell 200Mhz Pentium
I PC would be appreciated. Perhaps it's time to look at other distributions for
this PC such as Debian, which still will run on older hardware (?). (Also time
to buy some new workstations, yes?)

Has anybody had serious problems with upgrading their Red Hat V7.0 PCs to V7.2?
 Have not seen any in-depth reviews of RH V7.2 of late. I have one production PC
that I would like to upgrade, but between the kernel change (to 2.4.x) and the
filesystem change (ext2->ext3) I'm concerned that they upgrade process may kill
the PC altogether.

Thx.

jimI.




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