[ale] Finally!!

[Patrick Ramsey]

Robert, not to down you or anything, but I would go ahead and upgrade to 6.0.  It has the newer kernal and a lot of bug fixes.  If you can't get aholf of a decent ftp site to download the entire 6.0, at least upgrade the kernal and patch it to 5.9.  It sucks major when you get everything working only to find out you've got holes.  :(

>>> Robert Heaven <rheaven at bellsouth.net> 05/17 3:10 PM >>>
Well, I finally made it. After several years of scrounging hardware I
finally got enough to build myself a Linux box. (I had to have an extra to
keep the wife and kids happy with their AOL) Last week I bought the wife
and kids one of those new eMachines and took the older Compaq for my toy.
(Presario 4704, p133, 48M, 1.6G, EIDE Zip)

So, This past weekend I had my first experience loading Linux. (I'm not a
virgin anymore) I Loaded Red Hat ver5.2 that I had bought 6 months ago in
anticipation of this moment. (if I seem a little giddy you can understand)
With the exception of a few minor irritants, everything went well.

Problems:

1. I wish the RH setup had of been able to let me know that the partition
sizes I had selected weren't large enough for the packages I had selected.
Took me 2 tries just to get to the point where I could do a "df" and see
how they should be.

2. I had trouble recognizing the Zip drive. Linux had no trouble at all
finding it. However I didn't know it until I looked at the boot-up messages
that it was seeing it as a hard drive (hdd). At that point I understood why
I was getting an I/O error during the setup program and had to skip a disk.
So all I had to do then was put in a zip disk and run fdisk /dev/hdd and
build a file system on it. Now, all I need to do is figure out how to
create a mount point called /mnt/zip to go along with the /mnt/cdrom and
/mnt/floppy that are already there.

3. I have a Compaq V50 monitor (15"), which is not in the list of monitors,
so I had to select the generic Extended SVGA (800x600) monitor type. It
seems to look OK.

4. MODEM YUK! Of all the problems I've seen discussed on the mailing list,
modems seem to be the number one issue. Well, mine don't work either. The
modem that originally came with the computer is a Compaq 33.6
voice/data/fax modem. Well, who cares anyway. MediaOne is only a few weeks
away from having cable modem service at my house (a friend 4 miles up the
road just got it), so I'm just going to borrow a V.32 external so I can
test pppd for now. Besides, I still have this laptop for my own stuff. (and
if you're wondering why I haven't loaded Linux on this laptop, I can give
you 2 good reasons: Built-in win-modem and Quicken)

Over the next few days (or weeks) I'll be installing another NIC and
setting up all the little do-dads for building my internet
gateway/firewall/proxy/etc. Wish me luck.

RH