D&C GLUG News and reviews

Mandrake 8.0 on a laptop

http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/

Review by Neil Williams.
The views expressed in this review are those of the author and not necessarily those of the GLUG.

Advent 5372DVD laptop
Intel Celeron 700MHz (Pentium Pro 744.36MHz)
PCI ISA IDE bus
8 + 8kb internal cache, 128kb external cache
120MB RAM
1.44MB Floppy drive
6Gb hard disc
SiS SVGA 1024kb color video adapter
13.3" TFT screen SiS 630
upto 32MB video ram on demand
16 bit Soundblaster Pro compatible
DVD-ROM
56k internal fax modem SiS7013
Internal 10/100 Mbit Ethernet LAN card SiS 630
Sis v3 VESA
Windows ME installed at purchase

Installation:

The Advent laptop will boot straight from the Installation CD - just set the BIOS to boot from CD - press Del at the very start of the boot process, as soon as the screen comes on. The boot sequence can be set in the Advanced CMOS setup page. Whilst in the BIOS, I added a supervisor password to protect the installation from future BIOS alterations. I left the user password unset so that the password will only be requested when the BIOS is changed. Once the installation was complete, I changed the 1st boot device to IDE-0 and disable 2nd and 3rd boot devices to help increase the security of the data. I inserted the installation CD and exited the BIOS.

Mandrake 8.0 Installation booted from CD and loaded the 2.4 kernel OK. First and second stage install processes completed OK and the graphical Installer started. A little monochrome to start, just the traffic light indicators (green for done, yellow for in-progress and red for yet to start) down the left side, one for each stage of the install/upgrade. The colour scheme can be altered using the colour bar in the bottom left corner of the screen.

Once the package installation started, a colourful series of banners are used to indicate the features of the packages being installed. Much more interesting than the old stream of package names that made little sense to the novice (a substantial portion of the Mandrake user base). The banners cycle over a 10 minute period.

I choose the language and was glad to see the touchpad was recognised OK. I accepted the installation agreement and went for the recommended update. (This machine was previously running Mandrake 7.2.) Confirmed mouse as standard (seeing as the touchpad works). "Finding packages to upgrade" process took just under 5 minutes.

The packages I chose amounted to a total of 638Mb.

As part of the security protection built in to Mandrake 8.0, installation raised a server security question:- MySQL, cups, imap, apache, openssh-server, postfix, postgresql-server, proftpd, telnet-server, webmin, wu-ftd. These servers are activated by default. Do you really want to install these? YES.

Time estimated: 1hr 25mins (Note that half way through this time, the CD tray will suddenly pop open and Mandrake will ask for the second CD.) Completed in 1hr 25mins!

I hadn't used the Network Configuration Wizard before, so I went with the auto-detect. Why not? It detected the LAN connection, ethernet card (internal). No others detected (the Advent has an internal Winmodem.) IP address correctly identified and hostname, DNS and gateway all identified. Back to installation dialog briefly then Network and internet configuration completed. I then applied configuration.

The summary was all OK. Bootloader respected some of my previous settings, although it did change the password setting such that I had to enter the password for any boot image. It had previously only needed a password if extra kernel options were specified. This was sorted with a small edit to /etc/lilo.conf

Now for X - where 7.2 had so many problems. X loaded first time! But the optimism was misplaced - the panel was not released by X! The screen just freezes and no terminals are visible using Ctrl-Alt-F1 etc. Exactly the same problem as with the 7.2 installation. Ctrl-C was ineffective and the upgrade had changed my start-up scripts so that telnet was not running! Running ping from another machine on the LAN found the laptop but obtained no response, so I had no means of controlling the machine from the LAN.

Post installation:

Power off! Installation wasn't complete and now the disk would have to be checked as well (automatic during re-start). CD - 2 was still loaded but the tray cannot be opened with power-off. Power on. New graphical bootloader menu is pleasant but causes an ugly mess when switching to boot Windows - all hexadecimal and flashing pink. The power down forced a check using e2fsck but the file system passed.

I used Escape to clear the menu and get access to the LILO command line. Entering 'Linux 3' allowed access to the machine without X causing a crash. Due to the incomplete install, /etc/httpd/conf/vhosts/Vhosts.conf failed to open, so httpd didn't start. I had to rename the default file (Vhosts.conf.save in the same directory.)

Using startx as root, X starts but fails to display. Ping was OK now but telnet was refused as it hadn't been set to start at boot-time yet. HTTP was still down as was webmin. Unfortunate that although these services were running before the upgrade, the upgrade didn't leave them be. X was still accessing hard disc but no display. Ctrl-Alt-F1 got some attention but not an intelligible display. SSH from another machine on the LAN got root access so I used 'shutdown -r now'.

Restarted using SSH access with CD-1 and then restarted the upgrade but no better. SSH access at least allowed me to start httpd and webmin. That, in turn, allowed me to start telnet, ftp and Samba, as well as getting access to xf86config (which didn't help).

One of the other machines on the LAN uses a TFT panel, so in complete innocence, I decided to try copying that XF86Config to the laptop, thinking that it was the monitor settings that were causing all the problem. And it WORKED! No further alteration was needed.

Upon closer inspection, I realised that Mandrake 8 had not upgraded XFree86 more than a minor revision, (I was part hoping for XFree86-4 which fixes a few problems with X not releasing the panel at shutdown). Next time, I'll backup the XF86Config BEFORE starting the upgrade!! The XF86Config file is available here. Remove the .txt before using.

Neil Williams