Author: JT Smith
What a weekend it’s been. I spent the better part of it installing Linux on what has
got to be the piss-poorest laptop computer ever built. The comical piece of junk to
which I refer is a Compaq 1200 series, which I bought quite deliberately for the
road. I’m confident it’s unlikely to get stolen, and if it does, I’ll be inclined to thank
the thief.
The Presario 1200 is an exceptionally poor candidate for Linux, having been
specifically designed to run Windows, and having every conceivable
money-saving dodge in place. It’s grotesquely underpowered, with 64MB of RAM.
It’s got a CMOS setup which forbids tinkering past setting the time and boot order.
It’s got a ‘system restore’ CD which Compaq is too cheap to put Windows on. This
is perhaps the single most unforgivable item in a vast catalog of offenses. No, the
Windows cabs are all taking up much-needed space on the thing’s puny 5GB hard
disk. So nuts to you if you fdisk the sucker and then fail to get Linux working
decently and have no choice but load Windows again. Compaq will sell you the
CD you’ll need for that, the damnable cheap bastards.
Of course it’s got a Winmodem in place of a real modem, and we all know it’s just
about impossible to make one of those toys work with Linux, thanks to the
trade-secret paranoia of their manufacturers. And we all know how badly broken
the 2.4.x kernel is for PCMCIA, which I insist on having.
But I did fdisk the little junker, and it did feel awfully good. And then I set about
forcing Linux down its ungrateful Windows-compatible little throat.
Since I’d reviewed several of the most recent distros in terms of their ease of
installation and found Mandrake by far the friendliest, I figured I’d take it easy on
myself and start there. I do run SuSE on my desktop and my wife’s, but considering
the number of quality deficiencies Compaq saddled me with, I felt I could rely on
Mandrake to ease the pain.
How wrong I was. First off, it was impossible to run X by selecting my actual video
adapter, a crap item by Trident called the “CyberBlade” (a bit like naming a toy
poodle “Ripper” — fine so long as the irony is intentended).
After various attempts at making it work I finally had to load a generic VGA adapter,
which compromised my lame machine’s performance even more than Compaq
intended. And once Mandrake was installed I had to wrestle with the Winmodem,
which turned out not so bad in the end.
The shitbox has a Conexant Winmodem, and this, it turns out, is the only bit of luck
I can report from the entire escapade. Conexant has got a Linux
driver, and it’s actually effective. The RPM didn’t work for me, but the tarball did, so
long as I deleted /dev/modem before running the shell script. Which I did, on my
fourth or fifth attempt….
All right, so I got my pathetic Winmodem working. A fat lot of good that does me at
home with my preposterously slow, dropped-every-ten-minutes connection to MSN.
(I told you, the box is primarily for the road. MSN is traveler-friendly, if not much
else.)
No, I’d have to get my ethernet card working with my little DSL home network. And
at this point Mandrake beat me down.
I am not a quitter. I ran the two-mile, wrestled, and boxed in high school; and these
are three competitive endeavors one wins solely by being more stubborn and
willing to eat pain than one’s opponents, who are themselves extremely stubborn
and willing to eat pain as well (otherwise they’d be on the volleyball team, now
wouldn’t they).
Mandrake’s idea of installing PCMCIA is to present you with a list of drivers.
You’ve got to install one of them, which it insists on testing. The installer won’t let
you go further until it’s satisfied with your choice. Of course if none of them
happens to work, well, you’ll just have to cancel.
I tried every driver that could possibly have worked, and Mandrake rejected them
all. I did research — I found out which other cards mine emulates. I was systematic.
I was patient, stubborn, and willing to eat pain.
I tried, and tried again. Nothing worked. So I jotted down a number of drivers
Mandrake had available for installation, and hiked up to my nearest CompUSA,
where I bought another bloody card, for which I knew Mandrake had the drivers.
And I inserted it, and I attempted to install it, and Mandrake made a sucker of me
again. Thirty bucks I burned on a spare ethernet card.
So I did some more research, and found a boot image for Mandrake tailored
specifically for PCMCIA installation.
Ah, pay dirt.
This boot image immediately caused the lights on the card’s connector to light up.
Surely I was minutes away from installing it. I booted from the floppy and ran the
Mandrake installation CD, and it crashed.
So i entered every safe-mode command I could think of — ide=nodma, lores, nofb,
noauto, expert, text….
No good, no good, no good. I even tried them all at once. No good.
At that point I fdisked the little junker again.
And then I busted out SuSE, which actually is my favorite, though YaST is
undeniably clunky and entirely too present in the background. Linux is Linux is
Linux, but different distros have their advantages and disadvantages. As distros go,
SuSE is the most flexible one I’ve tried.
So guess what? SuSE likes PCMCIA, even with the crap 2.4.x kernel. There was
no driver to choose; no bollocky ‘test’. I just named it eth0, gave it a generic
192.168.0.1 IP and 255.255.255.1 subnet mask
like any ethernet card, and that was that.
It understands the ‘CyberBlade’ as well, with no difficulties.
SuSE has no decent DSL support unless you’re in Germany, but that’s not a
problem if you’re willing to tweak it. I did give the distro a black mark for this in a
previous review, but that was from the POV of my foil Harry Homeowner, who’s
likely to be inconvenienced if not thwarted by such an omission.
As soon as I got SuSE installed, with eth0 painlessly configured, I simply ran two
nifty RPMs from Roaring Penguin, which make DSL in Linux ridiculously easy
whatever distro or homebrew setup you’ve got. I had the Compaq shitbox on
Verizon’s mighty broadband pipes in minutes.
So now we’re an all-SuSE household here at Chez Greene, and pretty well
delighted all around. We’ve got two desktops and one laptop, and room on our little
$100 router for another machine.
We’re expecting it in March.
All Content copyright 2001 The Register
Category:
- Linux
