Hi Everybody
I've been using Linux for about a year now, and I've tried Debian Woody/Sid, Mandrake 10.1 (back then), Ubuntu Breezy, Knoppix and finally I'm stuck on Fedora Core 4. I've never (well barely) had any problems installing a distro on a PC, it usually works "out of the box".
My first nightmare began last Friday, when I got my new Dell Inspiron 1300. In the shop, Ubuntu Live CD worked perfectly, no problems at all. Detected Synaptics Touchpad driver, could scroll with it, tap to click, everything. The screen wasn't perfect, but it worked. It's stuck at 1280x760. I couldn't test anything else at the shop, but this was enough for me so I took it home and spent 3 days playing with it to get FC4 to work.
Now, while Ubuntu looks nice, for me, it's not the best system. I never had much preference for not having a root account, and even though you can enable this in Ubuntu, it then seems to conflict with the SUID settings, so the only way I can do system administration is by opening up a root terminal and then running the GUI program. Also, several things I use just do not compile on Ubuntu (TinyFugue, Eterm) and I'm sure there's a way to do it, but after I've seen how FC4 is, I really can't do anything else
Anyway. Finally, on Monday morning I was able to get a bootable kernel following some advice on these forums to comment out parts of the /etc/rc.d/sysconfig files pertaining to the sound driver, which were hanging the installation at: "Initializing hardware: storage network". So, I got a 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 kernel working, it detected everything that it needed to (screen, ethernet, touchpad) and so I was able to 'yum upgrade' in an attempt to bring everything up-to-date.
Now I have 3 kernels to pick from in my grub menu:
Code:
2.6.14-1.1653_FC4
2.6.14-1.1656_FC4
2.6.11-1.1369_FC4
Third option works perfectly. First and second both hang at this step:
Code:
Loading keyring
- Added public key 123456789
- User ID: Red Hat, Inc. (Kernel Module GPG key)
pci_hotplug: PCI Hot Plug PCI Core version: 0.5
Now, while it's not really an issue since everything works with the 11-1 kernel, I'd like to be using the latest ones, and now that Broadcom are making a driver for their wireless cards, which this machine has, I'd eventually like to be using the 15-1 kernel, since I read that's all it is compatible with.
I really appreciate any and all help any of you can give me with setting this up, when the whole thing is done I'm planning to document it and stick it up somewhere, since this is a great machine and will be even greater when everything works
Thanks in advance,
