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

[Jed S. Baer]

On Fri, 23 Nov 2001 15:20:41 GMT
<jimintriglia at americanisp.net> wrote:

> 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). 

Dumb question. Has this PC ever successfully booted from CD? I don't
remember quite when PC BIOSes got to the point of loading the boot block
from a CD, but a P1 sounds pretty old for that capability.

<booting from floppy>
> Problem is that this Dell displays a boot error message when attempting
> to boot off the RH7.2 boot floppy 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).

Hmmm. Have you searched the kernel mailing list archives? The "large
image" doesn't ring true for me. It's quite easy to build a kernel which
is too large for a floppy, OTOH, a kernel with ATA/CDROM/Old-CD/ support
wouldn't be that big.

> 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?)

RedHat does lots of kernel patching, but if they've started pulling out
the code for various pieces of hardware, that's a new one on me. I have my
doubts about that. Dunno about the memory requirements.

> 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.

Well, what I would do is either:

1) Boot the existing system, and manually upgrade the kernel. Yes, this
might require also upgrading various other things as well, like gcc, glib,
glibc. But, the RPMS are all on the CD, and you don't need to run the RH
installer to get at them. A bit more of a pain, but you get control of the
process, and you can leave your existing kernel in place to boot from if
things go haywire.

2) Boot the existing system, and run the RH installer from their CD. No
reason you can't invoke it from the keyboard after booting to RL3 (hmmm,
maybe even from an Xterm). Take a look at the sysinit stuff on the boot
floppy you made. You should easily find the code they use to bring up the
installer. This method might suffer from RH's insistence on gobs of
memory. But memory, at least, is cheap these days. I don't know if it just
assumes X is not running, or checks first before starting up the GUI.
Actually, I think you should be able to find the actuall upgrade program
on the CD, and run it in your existing X server.

The ext3 filesystem is almost a non-issue. It's still ext2, but the
journaling stuff is extra on top of that.(Or so say the majority of
Slashdot posters.) Shouldn't kill anything, as the volumes are still
mountable as ext2. Yes, it's the default, but I dunno if they force it on
you. Again, running things manually would be the way to keep it from being
an issue.

Maybe Santa will bring you a shiny new 1.5Ghz Athlon system.

HTH
jed
-- 
  If R is the set of all sets which don't contain themselves,
  does R contain itself?