Creating hardware profiles
 

Hi there, I'm extremely new to Linux (and Red Hat 9).

I have a hard drive mount/rack, and I basically use it for school, for my OPS class (basically, Red hat 9 & Unix).
I need to do some work at home, but I'm afraid of sticking the drive in my pc since the hardware configuration is created on my workstation at school.

[Note: I'm not even going to bother using multiple operating systems in the system, so I will remove the windows drive to use the linux one.]

I know that windows xp goes belly-up if you try moving it to a new system, but linux is more versatile, since it can reconfigure all the devices on startup.
I just don't want to have to reconfigure EVERYTHING every time I move the drive home and to school.. plus there's a risk it too, could go belly-up.

Sooo... basically, I need to be able to create a second hardware profile. How would I go by doing this?



By the way, I'm at home at the moment, and I won't be able to do things in the lab until tuesday. I'd really like to get everything sorted out throughout the weekend.

Thanks in advance!

"but I'm afraid of sticking the drive in my pc since the hardware configuration is created on my workstation at school."

First, you should just try sticking the hard drive in the PC and see if it works. Put the hard drive in the same address in the new PC as it was on the old. Go into the BIOS and set the hard drive parameter to auto. Then boot. If the new hardware is similar enough to the old hardware then Linux will work.

If the new and old hardware are not similar enough to work then you will have to install Linux on the new PC using whichever drive you wish. In that case you should set up a dual boot system with two Linux systems, one for each of the two hardware configurations. You could also have a separate /home partition which is shared between the two Linux systems so that you only have a single copy of your data.


___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites

Right off the bat, I'm going to have to say that the hardware configs are going to be very different. Completely different processors, chipsets, video and sound devices, peripherals, monitor types, etc.

So basically, what you're saying is that I have to install linux again on the same drive to another partition?
I can't quite do that, since it's a puny 4.3GB drive, all in one partition, with Red Hat 9 taking up about half of that.
That, and it defeats the whole purpose of me having multiple profiles with a single install.

I know *something* has to be done with the x86config (or something along the lines), or in /etc/ , but I need some pretty in-depth instructions for it.

What I'd like to do is possibly boot up with a boot disk with the Hard Drive in (pri-master), and use a utility on this boot disk to reconfigure all the hardware, but save it to a different location (so that I can choose between "Home" or "Campus" hardware configs) on every startup.
You know, like what windows does.

From what I've gathered, there's no such thing as a hardware configuration selector (on bootup) for linux, right? Or is there?
Documentation online is very very sketchy, at best.

Ugh.. I've been searching for hours, and to no avail. Post any ideas you people have, please...

"Completely different processors"

You may have to have two different kernels because the kernel has different code for AMD, Intel, etc. but not different code for different speed processors by the same manufacturer.

You can set up two different copies /etc/X11/XF86Config and copy the correct version to /etc/X11/XF86Config with a script in /etc/rc.local. /etc/rc.local is the last script run at boot. In /etc/rc.local you could test the results of a uname command to find out what kernel you are running and then copy the corresponding XF86Config file to /etc/X11/Xf86Config.

This configuration might work where you have one Linux system with two kernels and two /etc/X11/Xf86Config.

Looking at the two system solution:
"So basically, what you're saying is that I have to install linux again on the same drive to another partition?
I can't quite do that, since it's a puny 4.3GB drive, all in one partition, with Red Hat 9 taking up about half of that."

You can save space by having the two Red Hat systems share a /usr partition and a /home partition. /usr takes about half the hard drive space in a Red Hat system. As long as both Linux systems use the same version of Red Hat then they can share /usr and /home OK.


___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites