The Linux Box replacing a Windows 2000 PC (underneath) and displaying http://village.glaine.net/school/

In a view to put together a Linux demonstrator PC for schools, I undertook to install RedHat 8.0 on my old PII 266 development machine. That will also give me more experience with Linux for when I finally switch from Windows.

I fitted a new Hard Drive on it, and because my loyal Matrox Graphics card had been cannibalized and re-assigned to my wife's PC I had to find a new graphics card as well.

The Red Hat site, I found is not very helpful - and I'm a programmer I can't imagine what beginers will think about it - it lists only a handful of compatible devices. In any case an S3-Trio card looked both too old and not listed so it went.

Finding a PCI graphics card nowadays is not easy. Don't even bother with PC World, all they know is at most a couple of brands. I don't know why I keep going there, probably because the smell of new electronics provides too strong an appeal that I can't fight. I mean they're just down the road.

There is a PC repair / sale / general fiddle shop down the road from the pub where we have our monthly LUG meeting here in Surrey so I tried this. Sure enough the guy had just got his hands on a series of 6 ViRGE GX cards and I got one for £5.

From the begining this installation was to be on a restricted budget. So no way I'm buying a CD writer just to create the RedHat CDs. Had it been before Xmas, ok, I may have bought the RH distro from a shop, but when I went to PC World, again they only had RH7.something. (Hello?)

So I decided on a network install - as recommended by the LUG.

1. Downloading the image files.
2. Exploding the ISO files.
3. Bootable Floppy.
4. HTTP Install.
5. FTP Install.
6. Configuration.
7. Graphics.
8. Localization.
9. RPMs
10. Memory / Performance.
11. Sound.
12. Fonts.
13. Printer.
14. Modem.

1. Downloading the image files.

I went to Red Hat, ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/8.0/en/iso/i386/

I have broadband Internet but that still took all night.

2. Exploding the ISO files.

Bearing in mind that I am on a Win2K machine, (Windows 2000) and that this will be my 'server' for the network installation, I need to find a way to extract the files from their ISO sarcophagus.

The free utility I found that was able to do that is: ISOBuster.
http://www.smart-projects.net/isobuster/
This is very easy to install and use, bar a couple of caveats:

+ To extract all the files, folders and subfolders you need, then you have to select them in the right pane, not the left one as this gives you an untelligible error message about the file being already open.

+ You need to extract from a format that's not ISO, otherwise you're not going to be able to retain the long filenames: long filenames will be truncated to 8.3 names. Ouch! this caused be a monent of doubt as you will see further down. This is not ISOBuster's fault however, but it's good to know. I extracted from the RR (RockRidge) format. Those ISO and RR headers on the CD are just FATs (File Allocation Tables), ie. a list of all the files on the CD and where they are, in their own format.

3. Bootable Floppy.

Once my files from the ISO images were extracted, I could finally start the installation. This involves rawriting the correct boot image onto a floppy.
Floppy? Well for once PC World proved of some assistance: They still sell Floppy discs!
I followed the RedHatinstructions And all went well. I would connect the Linux PC to my 'server' over a network connection, via a crossover Ethernet cable.

4. HTTP Install.

DHCP is a brilliant thing, it's all I had to select in the installer fot the Linux machine to see my PC at the other end of my crossover cable.

Now, you have to add the line:

127.0.0.1 localhost

in your /etc/hosts file in order to allow the machine to boot standalone, otherwise it will hang at startup while bringing up the network card. I don't understand what that line is not there by default.

I chose HTTP install. My Win PC is running the Xitami web server,
http://www.xitami.com/
a product I have been loyal to for ages.

However, despite all my best efforts, the Red Hat installer would not be able to establish a successful conversation. The Xitami error log would indeed show the requests from the Linux PC but for some reason it was returning a 404. (File not found in HTTP parlance.) The same request from my PC was successful, and the comparison between the error log and the access log could not yield any evidence. The only difference was that from the browser, the request was of the HTTP1.1 type where as RedHat was using 1.0. This does not seem to be related to the 8.3 filename problem described further down.

5. FTP Install.

HTTP having failed, I could still try FTP. A few minutes into the Xitami config file and I could enable the FTP server it comes with. I also had to map an alias to where the RedHat ISO images were and allow aliases for anonymous logins and I was ready.
You must have created three subdirectories called disc1, disc2 and disc3 in the directory of your choice. Each disc1..3 subdirectory must contain the files from the ISO images you got from RedHat.
When prompted by the installer, you must provide the name of the folder where disc1, disc2 and disc3 are.
For example: pub/stuff/redhat8 and NOT: pub/stuff/redhat8/disc1

The RedHat installer will be adding dis1 or disc 2 or disc3 to your path as needed (Even if it doesn't mention it when displaying file names it's loading.)

This went well until my install just froze on downloading the install image. No error message at all, just the % meter stuck on 0% and moving.

It's only going to take a few words here to reveal what was happening, but it took me three new attempts at re-installation from scratch to finally get it to work. The problem was simple. The RedHat files on my PC had been truncated to 8.3 letters so I got stuck on the first long filename. You'd think RedHat could have implemented an 'ls' call before attempting a download in their FTP technology. Well, they didn't. Using the RockRidge FAT did help (See above. 2: Exploding the ISO files.)

FTP does not allow a Graphic install, just text. Fine by me.
It took about 40 minutes for all the file to be FTP'ed down from the other machine.

6. Configuration.

Not being that experienced with Linux and especially GUI'ed Linux, I went for the simplest choices.
I chose a Personal PC installation. Good my graphics card and Illyama LCD monitor got recognized. (Although
the latter cannot be turned off by the screen saver it appears. (Win 98 can but not Win NT 4)
I chose Lilo over Grub as I seemed to remember some issues with Grub. Don't ask me anything more on Boot Loaders.
In order to be able to use telnet, I chose the dangerous option to not run the firewall.
It turns out that telnet is not available, only ssh is. Good but you need the client, I have PuTTY on my Win2K machine.

Unless you want to keep your set-up in US English, make sure you specify the extra language(s) you require during the installation process when prompted to do so.

7. Graphics.

I managed to log into KDE, however the graphics driver was not working properly. Plenty of 'snow' and two worringly bright vertical green bars on my monitor. After a few tries I opted to use the VESA driver. (It's a generic technology supported by a lot of cards, especially the older ones.) I know it's not ideal but it will have to do.
Shame the intended driver is not working - but I do not need blazing graphics speed on that machine. Up tp 6 kids at a time will be using this machine for browsing mainly so 800 X 600 at 256 colours on a 17'' monitor ought to do it. That should be ergonomic enough, and any slowness is not noticeable - from the graphics point of view anyway. Games would be a completely different story of course.

Later, when installing the machine in France, at the school, switching to 800 X 600 caused Open Office to malfunction: the menus were not displayed, just empty boxes with ghosts that turned out to be the underlines for the short cuts. I have no idea what went wrong, so I got stuck with 1024 X 768.

8. Localization.

You have to be careful with the way RedHat / KDE implement localization, ie. languages other than US English.
From the splash screen before you log in into KDE there is a language option - but that will not switch Open Office once you've logged-in.
You must change the language from within KDE. KDE->Settings->Language.
Of course whatever language you choose must have been installed with the operating system, when you were presented with a choice to do so. You usually have a main language and extra ones.

Language check-list:
      1. Make sure you install the desired languages at installation.
      2. When changing languages do it while inside KDE, not from the splash screen.
      3. Mozilla requires language packs to be downloaded. Activating them requires you to go to it's preferences menu.

For some reason, all the help that's given with Open Office is the English one. Help packages are available in other languages, but the Red Hat install only provided one: the English one. Someone from the French Open Office user group offered to targz and e-mail me his French help folder, but then I remembered I had the French Version installed on my Win2k PC. Well guess what, I transfered the whole help subdirectory from my Win2k PC to the Linux PC and bingo, the help was also available in French. Of course before that I had needed to delete the symbolic link for the French help that was pointing to the English directory. I then created a real directory to receive the French help files.
I'm confident this also applies to other langauges.

9. RPMs

An RPM package is a nice bundle of files, all put together in a file with a .rpm extension.

So you have to download this file and ask the rpm program to install it.
The good thing about rpm's is that they come with informaton about where the files they're made of live. So you download the rpm, cd to the directory where it is and type:
rpm -Uvh rpmname.rpm

Uvh: U=copy the files to where they should be, v=verbose, h=to display hashes for a nice formatting effect.

Now your RPM files should have been copied where they belong. Some RPMs may need to be build with rpmbuild but that's beyond the scope of this story.

10. Memory / Performance.

Now the machine was still atrociously labouring in disk accesses.
I added 32 extra Megs of RAM, all I could find for my old PII - 266 MHz, a machine that would only take EDO RAM. Still with 96 Megs the machine is now perfectly usable - if not blazingly fast. Adding another 32 Megs to bring the machine to 128 Megs has not made a huge difference, but still it's noticeable.

11. Sound.

The stupid ISA based Vibra 16C sound card in the machine was apparently seen by Linux but KDE would have none of it. I have had hair-tearing problems getting those cards to work with Windows as well, so I gave up on that card straight away.
I put in a PCI based sound card, one with a YMF-724 Yamaha chipset. That card was detected immediately without any fuss and worked straight away in KDE. Although not in the employment of Yamaha, I am more than happy to recommend it.

12. Fonts.

A. The font system that comes with RedHat 8.0 is not optimized by default. This because of patent issues. Now if you live in the US and want to comply with the Law you be stuck with yucky looking graphics.

Installing some free Microsoft fonts seems to improve things though. Here's how to do it:

http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/

Folow the instructions to get the publicly available Microsoft fonts that do indeed look much better. The instructions are detailed, acurate and work - at least with my RH8.0 installation.

B. You may still want to re-compile FreeType with the patent sensitive enhancing option:
When I installed RH8.0 I did not install the developer stuff - the PC is for a school, God I'd like the 7 year old kids to produce some C or Java, but let's remain realistic.

So when I tried to build my FreeType, after a few minutes of hard work it complained about missing X11 stuff and left me hanging without any useful result.

So the pacakages I needed were:
XFree 86 Development
XFree 86 Libraries.
FreeType Development

A good place where to find your rpm's is:
http://fr2.rpmfind.net/

This is a French (Yet English speaking) mirror of the main one (http://rpmfind.net/) which was broken when I started this.

This directed me to the modules I required:

ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/rawhide/1.0/SRPMS/SRPMS/freetype-2.1.3-5.src.rpm
ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/redhat/8.0/en/os/i386/RedHat/RPMS/XFree86-devel-4.2.0-72.i386.rpm
So I started a Terminal session (the only way to go about in real life) and after some command line ftp work got my rpm's.
the commands I typed were then:

13. Printer

I was given a HP DeskJet 850 C. Fairly massive in appearance and producing worrying noises, it appears to work all right.
Now, to set the printer in KDE, you go [Start Button], ie the KDE or red hat button -> System Settings -> Printing.
There follows a panel where you can add a printer. Now let the fact that from hence on a printer may be referred to as a Print queue, this still is a printer. That was very confusing to me. I couldn't believe that was the printer they were talking about.
Anyway click on 'New' and follow the instructions.
+ I chose 'Local Printer' as my HP was to be connected on the parallel port. (As opposed to for example, somewhere on the Network.)
+ /dev/lp0 is your first parallel port so that should be what you want in most cases.
+ Now you need to choose:
 - A brand   - A model    - A driver.

That last step I missed on my first attempt, and I got it partially working.
As far as my 850C is concerned, although recommended everywhere, the hpijs driver would cause the impression of an extraneous page containing only the line:
@PJL ENTER LANGUAGE=PCL3
which, as a tree lover I found to be a waste...
Switching to the cdj850 driver has solved the problem. I hear it's slower but that'll do for me.
I needed to reboot the machine before the printing could work properly from OpenOffice. I don't understand why OpenOffice has it's own Printer Set-Up options. In any case I didn't use it and it does not even list my printer. But it works using the default option, so well. Printing is not the best technology to showcase Linux yet, especially to newbies.
It is to be noted that HP actively supports Linux, and their e-mail tech support came back to me within 2 days with a relevant and helpful answer. So I am happy to recommend HP printers.

14. Modem

I am writing this in retrospect, as I am now back from France where I set up the modem. I had already switched the machine to French so any option or menu quoted here is my own translation back into English.
The modem, a 3 Com US Robotics 56 K Faxmodem, was recognized and set-up by Linux, but apparently not seen by KDE. In any case, choosing the available option of a generic 56K modem worked.
So, to configure PPP, I went to: System Tools->Internet Configuration. Then I followed instructions. The modem was not detected, but the defaults worked. I am not sure I understand the relationship between the Linux core and KDE here.
In any case it worked.
Now, I don't know if there's another way to do it, but configuring PPP this way required the users to provide the root password... I'll try and clarify this next time I am in France and get to play with this machine.

Many thanks to: Mark (Fonts), Caroline (Sound Card), David (Printer).

© 2003, The Village Of The Future
Author: Teebo Jamme
This machine has been put together with love for the Glaine State School in Glaine-Montaigut, France.