Adventures in the Museum - Installing Mandrake 8.0, Part I

Glen Gray 26th April 2001

This article discusses my experiences installing Mandrake 8.0 on a legacy PC, my first sweet heart, a Dell Dimension XPS P90 with 32Mb RAM.

But on with our binary tale. The Dell had been knocking around in pieces for a couple of years. It was originally bought back in 1994 as a replacement for my Amiga 500. Originally running with 8Mb RAM and a #9 GXE64 gfx card with 1Mb it was a good machine for its day. But a little too archaic for my needs today. Last year I managed to salvage some 72 pin SIMMS and up'd the RAM to 24Mb and more recently to 32Mb. I also swapped some other spare hardware for a Matrox Mystique with 4Mb RAM and acquired two 2.1Gb IDE drives, an Intel Ethernet Express 100 NIC and a 100Mbit HUB. I began rebuilding it as I wanted to learn more about networking and Linux. Like a lot of users I had only ever experienced Linux on my desktop PC and not in a network environment. The machine has been functioning as a server/gateway for my three machine HAN (Home Area Network). It was running various versions to RedHat 6.x and 7.0 throughout its resurrected life. I'd used diald as the means for doing demand dialling up to this point but had problems getting it to run properly on a 2.4 kernel. So in switching to 2.4 I was also going to experiment with using pppd to do the demand dialling.

So that's the history of the box. Now to the installation. I downloaded the ISOs for both CDs as soon as they were released. As slow process even with our fast connection here at work as everyone else seemed to have the same idea. The first thing I had to do was to create a boot disk as the BIOS on the Dell doesn't allow for this new fangled feature of booting of a CD of all things, even after updating to the latest version from the Dell web site. Backed up my config files to floppy for possible fall back later on if this didn't work. Booted the install disk and then...nothing. My screen went blank as the monitor lost its signal. But the box was still on, though appeared not to be doing too much. I realised that the kernel was probably trying to boot into a frame buffer mode. Sure enough a quick search later found that it was using a frame buffer mode and the you need a VESA 2.0 compliant BIOS to use the generic frame buffer in the kernel. Unfortunately the BIOS on the Matrox Mystique is only compliant with VESA 1.0, yes even after a BIOS update on it too. VESA 2.0 compliance is achieved either through a DOS TSR program or by the Windows9x drivers. I mounted the boot disk to see if there was anything that could be done. Sure enough I found LILO'esque settings in a file named "syslinux.cfg". I removed the default setting and the command to display the message (which was the part causing the problem). There were quite a few options in the file, more than is documented in the READMEs. I had the choice of either a Text based install or an undocumented (I think ?) VGA16. I decided to try the VGA16 as everyone goes on about how great the Mandrake installer is. And it is. Even running in a VGA16 X session. It was a little slow, either because of the X session or because of the way it's written. It looks like its a bunch of perl scripts that are using GTK bindings. Perl definitely figures in there somewhere.

The install recommended a text based install as my resources were low but I decided to recklessly continue on at my own peril. And the installer performed perfectly well. With the exception of one problem. With DiskDrak or whatever it's called, while pretty and extremely easy to use, seemed to be making a mess of the partition table. This manifested in the "swapon" command failing after I left the partition management screen. No helpful message was displayed just that swapon </dev/hda?> failed and I was promptly returned to the DiskDrak thingy. I switched to one of the terminal screens (can't remember which one) to see if there was any error messages. There was, it reported that the actual size of the swap partition didn't match what was in the partition table. I could have gone and tried to do fdisk from a bootable linux disk like "Tom's Boot disk" but I had boot disks for Partition Magic handy so used those instead. Setup the partitions the way I wanted in Partition Magic and started the Mandrake installer again. I setup the disks so that they both had a primary partition exactly the same size as I wanted to do RAID 0 across both IDE disks. Sick I know, software RAID on a 32Mb P90. But it's all about experimentation. The partition manager in the Mandrake install made it very easy to set that up. I set the partitions as ext2fs in Partition Magic and then simply changed the Type option for the partition under the installer to Linux RAID. I created an md0 device by selecting the "Add To" button for the selected partition. It basically just prompted me for the name of the RAID device and I said OK. I then choose to mount the new raid device md0 as / and formated it as ReiserFs. Easy. The rest of the install was rather uneventful, simply because it worked.

I choose to manually select the packages to install, didn't see the point in trying to install KDE or GNOME as I'd already played around with that before and to say it was SLOW would be an understatement. But I did install X and WindowMaker. What a cool window manager. Fast even on this system and it looks good too. I also installed some of the servers I needed to have this box act as the server for the HAN. These included Bind (named), the NIS (yp) servers and NFS server. It detected the network card and I entered in its settings. Then it detected the gfx card and configured it correctly. At the end of the installation process you get to choose the type of boot manager to use. You have three choices, Grub, Lilo (graphical) and Lilo(text). Lilo graphical is the default setting so I made sure to choose the text based Lilo. I've not had much experience with Grub so left well enough aloan there. The install process although relatively flawless (apart from the swap partition incident) did take a long time. Although I should point out that that is most definitely a hardware issue and not a fault of the installer. So if Grub didn't do what I wanted it to do then I didn't want to have to go through all the install process again.

After the installation I rebooted with my fingers crossed. Guess what, it worked. RAID 0 was started and mounted the / file system. Everything else started as expected. This then left me with the task of configuring the box as a server for the HAN. I'd already had experience with setting the server programs up from the last time I did this. Basically I NFS export "/home" on the Dell and have ypserv running. Then the client machines run ypbind and connect to the server for user authentication. The mounting of /home on the client is handy as I can login on any machine and have the same settings and files (of course it is dependent on the same software being available on all the clients). I decided to try and get pppd to do the demand dialling this time. And that worked quite well. Check out http://www.nic.com/~cannon/Linux for a quick guide to PPP dial-on-demand and IP Masquerading (IP Masquerading is only relative to pre iptables in 2.4 kernel).

Glen Gray <glen@antefacto.com>