Gentlemen (and ladies?),
Over this last weekend I made a determined effort to get the latest Mandrake
Alpha working on my LX164 and am amazed to report reasonable success. In the
absence of an installer (I couldn't find one newer than Jan 2000), I mounted my
new hard drive under my current system and made creative use of 'rpm --root'
and chroot to do a minimal install. To my complete amazement, the system
booted and ran with very few difficulties. I haven't tried anything advanced
like X or (and here I may be realy pushing my luck) KDE, but I can log in,
access remote FTP sites via my firewall and compile a new kernel.
In the course of doing this I found a few minor problems which folks may wish
to look at:
1) By default /etc/securettys is blank. I took me ages to work out why I
couldn't log in. I presume that the installer normally sets this based on the
security level chosen, but for those not using the installer, it might be nice
if it contained a default entry of 'tty1'.
2) The kernel source 2.4.3 RPM has a dependency on ncurses-devel, but cooker
has no such RPM available (either in Alpha or i586 so far as I can see). In
the end I used the one from RedHat 7.
3) Building the aic7xxx driver in the latest kernels requires byacc, flex and
db1-devel (God knows why!). These need to be added as dependencies to the
kernel source RPM. Ah, minor thought. I installed the kernel source RPM, but
I actually compiled a default kernel from ftp.kernel.org. Perhaps the Mandrake
kernel doesn't have these requirements. I will try to check tonight, but I
can't see why the aic7xxx driver would be different.
Thinking about it, I suspect that none of these problems are AXP specific
except for the fact that they are only likely to bite you if you don't have an
installer. Perhaps I should report them to the main cooker list, or can
someone from Mandrake pass them on?
Thanks,
Richard Simpson
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------Richard Simpson Farnborough, Hants, Uk Fax: 01252 392976 rsimpson@ewrcsdra.demon.co.uk
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