[RULE] Slinky install details

[chris at baidarka.net]

I was asked to write up some details on installing RedHat 7.3 on an old 
laptop using RULE's Slinky installer.  My notes are below.  Thanks, RULE!

-Chris from Seattle

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The laptop is an old Everex 4500, 16Mb RAM, 1Gb drive.

formatted hda to

swap 55Mb
/boot 55Mb
/ the rest
(had /home seperate, but that was a mistake -> ran out of room in /)

Used slinky-v0.3.4 iso on a cd.  Booted ramdisk.  Ran install:

/scripts/setup.sh

Script is straight forward, reading partitions, activating swap, etc.

Install asks for disk1 & 2 of RedHat 7.3

Install script had bug (Marco has since fixed), it loaded everthing but
the kernel, so it made lilo.conf without a boot image, and didn't make
boot disk.

When it finally asked to reboot, I chose "No"

Then loaded proper kernel image as follows:

With Disk1 in drive:

chroot /newroot mount /mnt/cdrom
cd /newroot/mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS/
chroot /newroot rpm -ivh /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS/kernel-2.4.18-3.i386.rpm
umount /newroot/mnt/cdrom

then edited /newroot/etc/lilo.conf and changed line:

image=/boot/

to:

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-3

and ran lilo:

chroot /newroot lilo

then rebooted to success!

cd /
reboot

SMALL THING: when installing all the rpms the laptop power-saving routines 
would notice no keyboard input for a while and shut down the laptop.  So I 
would occasionally hit a cursor-up key.  This had the unfortunate 
side-effect that it appended a bunch of control characters to the hostname 
and made my bash prompt almost unreadable when I first logged in as root.  
I simply edited /etc/sysconfig/network, and deleted the control characters 
after HOSTNAME= ... and re-logged in.


I did have X configuration problems: C&T65550 video driver "chips"
didn't work in XFree86 4.2, so I downloaded XF86_SVGA version 3.3.3.1-1,
made a symbolic link to it from /usr/X11R6/bin/X and ran Xconfigurator.

It probed for C&T65550 video board, and suggested SVGA driver for it.  I 
choose Generic PS/2 mouse, and Everex Stepnote keyboard.  I choose Custom 
monitor, and "Extended Super VGA, 800x600 @ 60 Hz, 640x480 @ 72 Hz" for 
monitor section.  I choose 50-100 Hz for Vertical sync range, and 2Mb 
video memory.  No Clockchip Setting.  I choose a bunch of screen 
resolutions under 8, 16, and 24 bit, and when it tested the configuration 
it settled on 16-bit 800x600.

Then I installed the xinitrc and XFree86-xdm packages off of disk1, and 
rebootedto a gnome-session.

I found gnome a bit much on 16Mb RAM, so I went with the Icewm window 
manager to free up a little memory.

Viola!




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