[CLUE-Tech] Laptop for Installfest

[Kurt Sturm]

Good news.... I installed mandrake on the laptop and the drives do
indeed hot swap. Now for the BAD news, I cannot get X to come up in
graphical mode. Ugg!! Just turned my laptop into a paper weight. I am
looking around linux-laptop.net to see if there is a solution to this.


On Sun, 2002-06-16 at 16:50, Matt Gushee wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 16, 2002 at 03:16:41PM -0600, Kurt Sturm wrote:
> > Hello all, here is a question for anyone willing to take a crack at. I
> > have a Dell Latitude CS 500 MHz Pentium 3 Laptop. I would like to
> > install my copy of Mandrake 8.2 on it. But here is where it may get a
> > little sketchy.
> 
> Then again, it may not. I'm not familiar with that model, but based on
> my experience, there's a possibility it will just work. Have you tried
> an installation on it?
> 
> > The laptop has external CD ROM and Floppy drive. Under windows you just
> > execute a program that lets you hot swap the devices. There is only one
> > port so either the CD ROM can be connected or the Floppy can be
> > connected, both can not be plugged in at the same time. 
> 
> I would be surprised if the basic task of recognizing a device were
> really dependent on Windows. Probably that program you're referring to
> is accessing the BIOS to recognize/activate the device. Linux, once it's
> booted, has its own means of interacting with hardware, completely 
> independent of the BIOS.
> 
> Which doesn't guarantee that your drives will be recognized under Linux.
> If they are I'd be willing to bet you don't need to run a special
> program to hot-swap them. But it's conceivable you'd need an unusual
> kernel module that might not be available during installation. 
> 
> > I was thinking about attending an installfest, to see if this can be
> > done. But I don't want to waste peoples valuable time if it cannot be
> > accomplished. Any thoughts on this one? 
> 
> As far as Installfests go, I can only speak for myself, but I wouldn't
> consider it a waste of time to learn more about what works and what
> doesn't in installing Linux.
> 
> It wouldn't hurt to see if you can get some specific information about
> running Linux on this model. If nobody in CLUE has done it, you might
> try the Linux Laptop Home Page -- http://www.linux-laptop.net/.
> 
> Also, I'm not sure about Mandrake, but most Linux distributions offer
> several installation options, so if you can't install using the normal
> CD-ROM, chances are good you could use either an external CD-ROM
> connected to the parallel port or some form of network installation.
> 
> -- 
> Matt Gushee
> Englewood, Colorado, USA
> mgushee at havenrock.com
> http://www.havenrock.com/
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