[ale] Mandrake 8.0 on Compaq

[Greg]

Ghhgh (self inflicted LART)... I saw the "Compaq" part and not the "DeskPro
" part... I have a DeskPro 5100 here that I have put Mandrake 7.2 on, but I
used the install-by-floppy method and it was ok, though it loaded really
slow (I think it has only 16 megs of RAM and an ancient CD-ROM).  I also
have a DeskPro xl5100 and a prolinea 4/66 - both as yet unused that I dug
out of a dumpster. However I plan to run either Smoothwall (a firewall and
nothin' but) or OpenBSD on them.. hopefully to do it this weekend.

Thanks for the heads up, Jeff.  I will look out for that this weekend.

As for the original post... I am sure that you can install Linux on it, but
you might have to finagle it...especially if you have a really small hard
drive.  That is one of the reasons I love Linux and the BSD's - they don't
try to fix things by throwing more hardware at it.  Also, (it was a loooong
time ago and my memory is weak) another problem is that I think that
Compaq's (???) or maybe it is hp's (???) have a special bootable (?)
partition that is used to "fix" the winbloze system the OEM installed.  This
is so, I am thinking,  that after a user fries their system all you have to
do is insert a CD and it will automagically fix the OEM install.  I had
problems with it when I tried to find "missing" disk space one time.  I had
to use a floppy and fdisk the disk and the mbr.

But I would definitely try..... if it fails you can try an another
distro...or an older one .....or bring what the problem is exactly to this
group.

-----Original Message-----
From:	jeff [mailto:jeff] On Behalf Of Jeff Hubbs
Sent:	Saturday, September 08, 2001 12:56 AM
To:	Greg
Cc:	Gale, Paul; ale at ale.org
Subject:	Re: [ale] Mandrake 8.0 on Compaq

Greg - one thing you want to look out for in any old PC is the
buggy-PCI-EIDE-controller problem that I have read affected about a
third of all PCI-bus systems manufactured for some stretch of time (I
don't recall the range).  There is a Web page that details the issue
somewhere (the names of the bad chips are CMD640 and RZ1000 or RZ100,
I'm not quite sure).  Using tomsrtbt or soem other way to boot into
Linux, look at the dmesg and see if there's a complaint.  If it says
"buggy CMD640." there is a workaround that you can engage via kernel
config, but even that doesn't help the additional problem that some of
the bugy chips were also wired up wrong on the mobo.  THe nature of the
problem is such that any preemptive multitasking OS (NT, *BSD, Linux,
OS/2) is going to have trouble (IIRC).

I have an EISA-bus Prosignia VS and a Prolinea 575e.  The former has a
SCSI controller that was unsupported for a long time; don't know the
current story.  As for the Prolinea, IIRC its controller is OK.  Some
Compaqs expect special setup/diag partitions on the HDDs that you can
get around having by using floppies although it's a pain.  I think I
have checked a Deskpro before with tomsrtbt and its controller was AOK.

BTW, as for the buggy-IDE problem, the best solution unfortunately is to
just not use the controller.  On one of my machines (an AT&T P/90), I
put in an Initio SCSI controller and a 4GB SCSI drive.  For the machines
that are going into my MOSIX cluster, I plan to make the ones with the
bad controllers be the ones that network-boot.

- Jeff

Greg wrote:
>
> I have done it on a compaq presario 5000 series several times with no bad
> experiences.  I have set the bios up to boot from the cd rom and I just
put
> the Mandrake cd in and let fly.
>
> Have fun
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From:   owner-ale at ale.org [mailto:owner-ale at ale.org] On Behalf Of Gale,
Paul
> Sent:   Friday, September 07, 2001 2:23 PM
> To:     'ale at ale.org'
> Subject:        [ale] Mandrake 8.0 on Compaq
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm thinking of installing Mandrake 8.0 on a Compaq Deskpro PC (not sure
> exactly what model). I've heard bad things about trying to install Linux
on
> Compaq's in general. In the abscence of a specific question can anyone
> advise as to the merit to tackling an install of Mandrake on a Compaq?
> Caveats? Forget it completely?
>
> Paul
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