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

[David Willson]

Did you try swapping CD-ROMs like the tech recommended?  If not, I have a
spare I can loan you, and I'll be at the next CLUE meeting.

I successfully installed Red Hat 7.1 on my P133 with 64MB, and it's still
running quite happily there, so I'm not sure what the 132MB(?) limitation is
about...

Lastly, I have never, ever upgraded a Linux or even a Windows system.  I
always clean-build, and usually onto a newly created partition.

-----Original Message-----
From: clue-tech-admin at clue.denver.co.us
[mailto:clue-tech-admin at clue.denver.co.us]On Behalf Of
jimintriglia at americanisp.net
Sent: Friday, 23 November, 2001 08:21
To: clue-tech at clue.denver.co.us
Subject: [CLUE-Tech] Upgrading to Red Hat V7.2 - Experiences?


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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