Installation Problems on Tablet PC
Here's the dealio:
I have a Fujitsu Stylistic 1200 Tablet PC. For those of you who don;t know, it is circa 1998, bog standard Pentium 120MHz. I've plussed it up to 80MB RAM and a 40GB HD. I wanted to run a leaner OS on it, and given my familiarity with Unix, current use of Mac OS X (Basically BSD with a very nice GUI) and desire to learn more about Linux, I dove in.
However, there are some challenges with the St1200, namely it does not have a floppy, CD Rom drive or a USB port. It does have a serial and parallel port, along with 2 PCMCIA slots. After much research, I determined the best way to get linux on there (since I don't have a PC Card drive or a serial CD ROM, and i don't think the BIOS would boot into either of them anyway), would be to remove the HD and put it into another computer, install linux and then put it back.
So, i first started with RH9. I took out the HD and put it into my friends old Dell Inspiron. I went with a pretty minimal install, but when I put the HD back in, I got the ol' blank screen of death. After fiddling, research and a nice guy on craigslist, i determined that the installation had compiled the linux version for the 686 (which the Dell had) and this was causing some significant kernel issues. After replacing a few key libraries with images of the 586 versions, i managed to get it working, but it was still pretty ugly.
Then I tried Debian 2.2 minicd. That pretty much worked right away, but I ran into a small glitch. The glitch being, after I installed the base packages and the install program asked for a reboot (to do all the configuration and compilation of additional libraries), I put the HD into the ST1200. Nothing. Put it back into the Dell, configured it, and then replaced it into the ST1200, came up fine. the only problem is that all the configuration is for the Dell's hardware and I've had to manually replace a lot of stuff (most of which I don't understand).
SO, here are my questions:
#1 IS there anyway to force a Red hat (or Debian) install to compile for a specific processor ? in this case, I want to go with the 586. I know there is a way to do this once the OS is installed, but is there is a way to do this at install time ? there are a lot of options which aren't well documented.
#2 is there any howtos on installing a package from the HD ? Now that I have my minimal install on the St1200, I'd like to copy an installation image onto the HD and just rerun the whole dealio from there. Everything that I can find on the web seems to be dual OS-centric, not a lot of stuff about pure linux over linux installs.
#3 Any other great ideas on this ?
thanks!!!!
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