[Rule] fc5 testing report

[Franz Zahaurek]

Hi George,

Kargiotakis George <kargig at noc.uoi.gr> writes:

> Hello all,
>
> first of all I would like to congratulate you all on this great project. Mr
> Kweskin was the one who introduced it to me.

I think it's rather a /small/ project dealing with /great/ problems when
trying to install /new/ software on /old/ hardware :-)

>
> Mr Kweskin started installing fedora core 5 on an old laptop of mine. Laptop
> basic specs are as follows:
>
> model name      : AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor
> cpu MHz         : 328.034
> Total Ram: 64Mb
> Neomagic Video Card
> 4Gb HD

This is not so bad.  I did all my tests on PI/100MHz/64MB (now 96MB).

>
> The install.log is also attached.

I loocked over it and it seems to be ok.  That's also the point where
my competence ends - being able to boot FC5 installed by SLINKY.

>
> The installation was a bit painfull in order to get the right packages in. First
> of all we had a serious problem about the recognition of pcmcia devices. If I
> remember correctly the pcmciautils-011-1.2 package was missing and no pcmcia
> devices could work. Drivers were loaded as modules perfectly but no devices
> were created in /dev without this package.

Sorry, I have very limited experience with PCMCIA.  I can easily add
missing devices to /dev (please show ls -l of them) but I am not
aware, that I dropped files from /dev in the devel tree.

To the missing packages: /Which/ packages are missing /where/?

>
> When that was fixed and we could finally update/install packages from the
> network, we started installing some kdrive/X server dependencies. The new Xorg
> 7 packages are quite different from the list we had regarding the previous
> version (which referred to fc4 I think). I attach a .diff file which is the diff
> between 2 "rpm -qa --last" commands. The first was from the clean "console-only"
> installation and the later one was made after all the needed Xorg packages were
> installed for kdrive to work. This is were Mr Kweskin had to leave...
>
>>From now what I did was on my own. I am not a fedora user (I am a long time
> gentoo user though), so don't flame me for any mistakes I might have done. The

I am debian fan after longtime using rh6.  But what can be done if
'everybody' wants to install fedora?  Fedora's textbased install method asks for
64MB but it complained about too less memory when I tried it with 64MB.

> rest could be considered as a first aproach of someone with no previous
> experience on both fedora and rule-project.
>
> After some fiddling with kdrive and defaultclientargs inside /usr/bin/startx, I
> was able to get kdrive with Xfbdev working. Something quite important that I
> really had to change was to add vga=788 inside the kernel command in
> /boot/grub/grub.conf. Else I got no /dev/fb0 device and Xfbdev could not work.

That's the fine thing about grub, that you can edit it's config while
booting.  I remeber to have seen another magic vga=791 somewhere.  But I
don't know what it means.

> [...]
> Adding more packages is really easy with yum, yet there is a problem with yum
> and old machines. As far as I know, yum is written in python and python is
> quite slow. In order to make yum search for a package you need a lot of
> patience and you need not touch the computer while yum runs. yum takes around
> 45 of my 64Mb ram while search the repos for a package and I have even seen it
> take up 72Mb of RAM+SWAP space while installing various packages. This is
> killing the machine. What is trully needed is a small application to search
> through the repos. I've been told that apt-get is able to work on fedora too,
> but I have not tried it yet. Are there any other alternatives faster than yum,
> even only for searching through repos and not installing packages?

Seriously: I would use rpm -i to install packages.  This tells about unresolved
dependencies and you can resolve them by hand, one after one.

>
> Another point I would like to make here is how bloated some fedora packages are.
> [...]

The only thing we can do about that, is to cry together.

>
> The next problem I had with fedora was installing greek fonts and viewing greek
> chars in websites with dillo. I guess this is probably because I am totally
> inexperienced with fedora. But rule-project's installation did not install
> anything in /etc/sysconfig/i18n. In fact there was no such file there. After
> some friend's "rpm -qa" output from his full fc5 install I was able to see some
> fonts I was missing. I installed them and now I can see greek chars in dillo.
> Still no typing though and no greek chars in console. But I think I will manage
> that too...sooner or later.

Please could you tell exactly /what/ was missing.  I will try to add it.

>
> I am also attaching some pictures I took with a digicam of the laptop. I still
> can't find any program to take screenshots in fedora with only a few decent
> dependencies that will not waste all the precious resources of this old laptop
> :)

In X11 the tool is xwd for capturing and xwud for displaying.  But you
probably wont install gimp to convert the raw files to some commonly
used format.

>
> Running new versions of software on old machines is something very very nice.
> Even if was only for security reasons (which is not the case here) it would be
> a great project. And rule-project is great. But aren't all these dependencies
> from fc5 hogging down the system ? I might not be the best judge for this...but
> imho fc5 looks a bit "heavy" for such a task.

Yes and no.  I think it really depends about what demand you have.
Better try to get the right software that fits your need, but not buy
a new computer because a new OS demands for it.  That's often too much waste.


Bye,
- Franz