some background: I have a xeon machine running suse8.2 and fc4 dialects of linux, an LFS (linux from scratch) instance, plus doze-xp, all booting thru grub, and I write linux c/c++ code for autonomous robots, so I know a wee little bit about what's going on behind the bling bling. My new housing situation allows me to piggyback my landlord's wireless cable internet connection but my computer room has terrible link signal because the access point is way on the other side of the house...plus my dual xeon doesn't work well in smp or hyperthreading mode with the limited support b/g wireless cards that are available for linux. I ended up having to use the rt2500 in non-smp mode: a non-optimal solution! Anyway, my solution is to install a bare linux distro on a legacy MB8500-TVX mobo (pentium classic) that will sit in an optimum wireless reception point in my apartment. Then I'll use that machine as a firewall and wireless ethernet bridge: wireless on one side and wired 100bt on the other. The machine will provide iptables firewalling/NAT, caching only DNS, mail server, etc. The target platform is pentium classic, there is no working floppy controller on the machine (presumable fried by the previous owner because there was no key on the ribbon connector port), and the old 1995 BIOS is too buggy to allow booting the CDROM. That leaves me with only one option if I intend to use that machine: I must prepare the hard disk on my xeon machine and move it to the target platform. I don't have time or motivation to recompile my LFS distro for the pentium classic because I originally prepared it specifically for the xeon and that took me two months. Enter option 2) I tried to use the FC4 distro CDs (on my xeon) to install on a usb2 connected hard disk that I would move to the target machine as the primary IDE hard disk. It seems that even though the FC4 CDs are listed as pentium friendly the folks who prepared them may have generated kernels that don't work on the pentium classic, or at lease the penium classic in combination with an ISA/PCI combination architecture. OOPS! I tried a workaround of genning my own 2.6.11 kernel and sticking it into the target disk as a bootable grub image, but then once the kernel is running it cannot run init which resides on an ext3 partition...All I did was take the stock CD kernel and change the target platform setting to pentium classic. Again, I suspect compilation that was done for the higher end pentium platforms to be on the CDs. After reading the FC4 release notes the indication is that pentium classic (should) be supported...so, the question is: did the guys who prepared the ISOs make a goof? Did they test the ISOs on all supported platforms before releasing them? and I'm quite hesitant to suggest the last option because it makes an easy out even if it isn't true: Did the CD install procedure that I did on the xeon pick a kernel package that was optimized to what it thought my platform was? Comments, questions, suggestions? tanks -Prowel __________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com
