How to help? was Re: Serious reservations about FC2 release on 5/18

[Lamar Owen]

On Monday 17 May 2004 16:15, Geoffrey Leach wrote:
> Re-reading the comments in Bugzilla, I see a lot of heat, but very little
> light.  In particular, I find no mention of MB mfg and BIOS mfg and
> version, which means we're missing potentially significant info.

> Here's what I'd suggest.  Would someone with expertise in this area come up
> with a procedure to follow, beginning with a raw disk?  Install Windows or
> Linux first?  Partition setup, ....  etc.  Follow this with a set of
> questions to be answered, as to hardware, BIOS, etc.  Perhaps the critical
> factors can be discovered.

I'll post my info from my one scratch hard drive install (the 200GB home 
machine).  I did not scratch my notebooks' drives; I just used XP's installer 
to repartition it, in both cases.  Installed XP into a 7-8GB partition, then 
installed Fedora (Core1 on the old notebook, Core2 Test2 on the new one).  
GRUB in MBR in all cases; It Just Worked.  Actually, the Sony install was a 
little more complicated, since I did a Ghost upgrade from the original 30GB 
drive to a 40GB drive, and had to rewrite GRUB when I did so.

>From a new zeroed 200GB Maxtor, I first installed Win2k into a 4GB partition.  
I then installed XP into its own 4GB partition.  I then installed WBEL3 using 
custom partitioning into an 8GB / partition, with a 100MB /boot.  I then 
installed FC1 into its own 8GB / partition, with a separate 100MB /boot.  I 
then mounted the WBEL3 boot under FC1 and synchronized both grun.conf files.  
FC1 and WBEL3 share swap.  Once that was all working, I created my 60GB /home 
and my 100+GB FAT32 data exchange partition (shows as G: in windows, and 
~/data on the FC1 and WBEL3 side (mounting with options for ownership, etc).

It Just Worked.

Matsonic 8137+ mb with latest BIOS, I think.  Using motherboard ATA100 
controller.

The notebooks are different beasts: the 600m has the Centrino chipset 
(wireless, Pentium-M etc).  The Sony FXA-49 has a KT133, I believe, and an 
Athlon4 mobile CPU.  It has the latest Sony BIOS.
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu