Inspiron 530 on f7
David
idht4n at hotmail.com
Fri Sep 28 20:27:25 UTC 2007
I recently bought a Dell Inspiron 530 with Ubuntu and made it
dual boot Ubuntu/f7. There were a few quirks along the way,
so I thought I'd shard them with this list. In the future,
is there a better place to post this kind of info (eg, one
where I can upload screenshots, etc)? It would be awesome if
I could attach this kind of stuff to my smolt profile. Anyway,
for now, here are some of my notes...
First, I wanted to keep the factory Ubuntu installed, so I
wanted to repartition the disk to make room for f7. In
fact I made room for f8 as well. I bought the lowest end
version I could get which came with a ~150G Ubuntu partition.
I first tried to use the gparted live CD to repartition it,
but it seemed to hang at some point. So I tried the f7 live
CD that has gparted and that worked. I repartitioned the
drive so it now looks like the following (originally sda6
was bigger and sda[78] didn't exist).:
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19452 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 6 48163+ de Dell Utility
/dev/sda2 7 268 2104515 b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda3 * 269 293 200812+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 294 19452 153894667+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 294 455 1301233+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 456 6704 50195061 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 6705 13078 51199123+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 13079 19452 51199123+ 83 Linux
Next, I downloaded the f7 DVD iso into a file on my Ubuntu
partition and downloaded and burnt an f7 rescue disk (I
didn't have any blank DVDs to burn, so I figured I'd do
a hard drive install). I booted to the rescue disk and
changed the boot options to have "askmethod" so I could
do a hard drive install. The system paused for several
minutes with a message having something to do with
ata_piix then continued. But when I tried to select
a hard drive install, it gave me some error about
no device. So I tried an http install and it gave me
the same error. It couldn't find my hard drive or
my network card apparently. :( So I googled for
a while and found to try adding irqpoll to the boot line.
This worked for me and I was able to continue with my
hard drive install. I did a custom installation of
f7 onto /dev/sda7 to preserve Ubuntu and didn't install
grub. After the install was completed, I modified
the /grub/menu.lst on sda3 from Ubuntu to add f7 as
a grub option. It would have been easier to just
install grub from the f7 install, but I wanted to leave
everything as close to factory as possible. So I added
something like this to the end of menu.lst:
title f7 (2.6.21-1.3194.fc7)
root (hd0,6)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7.img
This worked and I was able to boot into f7. The next
problem was that the ethernet card was not detected!!
Some more googling found a fedora forum page that
pointed to directions to download a driver from Intel:
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/printthread.php?t=162008
This worked and my new Dell is now dual boot Ubunto/f7.
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