Neil's Open Source & Linux Blog

Command Line Email in Linux http://tldp.org/LDP/linuxcookbook/html/cookbook_38.html

Summer Fun The big news is Parker (as in Charlie), the new RH9 web server. Right after that, I moved to a new apartment. I had to shut down the home network and I haven't restored it yet. I've really moved over the hp ze4145 laptop, Zephyr, with Win XP Home. I'm running Cygwin on that to talk to the remote boxes using ssh from the command line. I found Jon Udell's blog, Jon's Radio . I lost trck of him after Byte wemt pay-per-view. He's a mad blogger, with UserLand's Radio. I think that let's him post pics to his blog. That's a key feature. I don't think Blogger supports that. Turns out Jon is a Christopher Lydon fan, too.

Installation News It turns out that the Gateway had a bad RAM chip, and when I swapped it out, the install went fine. I ended up installing Red Hat 9 on that box, with the intention to use it as a server of some sort. I have the exact same model at home, with, I think, a ATI Rage 128 video card. I also installed RH9 on that box and set it up as an NFS/Samba file server. That's working quite well; I really like the RH9 administration tools. Setting up Samba in particular was a breeze using the new RH9 tool, compared to editing the config files or even using the SWAT tools. I've updated all of the Linux boxes at work to RH9, and upgraded the old Compaq Presario 1200 laptop to RH9 as well. That disabled the Linksys wireless network card, but I was able to restore it easily with the new Linux Red Hat 9 RPMs for the wlan pcmcia card , from the linux-wlan-ng 0.2.0 RPMS site.

About this Blog I've been using Linux for a few years now, and administering both Linux and Windows servers. My company, Cadent Technologies Corp. , hosts some of our client's sites on Window 2000 using IIS 5.0 and SQL Server 7.0. I've been working with IIS since it came out, and Cadent has also specialized in ASP development. I've wanted to switch the company from Windows to Linux for some time. We are now using Linux as our file server, and I've started to migrate our clients and current projects to PHP. Once we move our web sites to PHP (on Windows), we can then move the sites to PHP on Linux, and then move the databases from SQL Server 7.0 to MySQL or Postgres. I realized it would take some time, so I started by using open source software on Windows, so I could run the same apps on Linux. I'm using the Mozilla Composer to create this blog. Composer tip: use Format >  Paragraph > Paragraph to insert <p> tags, not <br>...

Gateway Stats From the BIOS (ver. WL81020A.15A0005.P04): Intel Pentium III 800 Mhz, 133 MHz front-side bus. 512 MB RAM - 2 X 256 MB. I think the problem is that this box uses shared video RAM. For more information, see the Red Hat Knowledge Base Article on the i810 chipset .

Restored! The OEM (Gateway) system restoration worked, at least to the point where the computer boots from the HD. I'm going to let it chug away and then I can get all of the driver and hardware info from Windows 98. Yet, strangely, the Restore seems to have hung on the third CD, where many of the drivers are installed.

No Luck at All I booted off of the Partition Magic 8.0 CD and wiped out all of the partitions. Then I tried to use the Red Hat 8.0 CD to install. That dies with a kernel panic. Same with the generic Debian boot. With Debian, the "vanilla" option doesn't work, nor does the default option. When I tried again, with the "bf24" option. I'm not getting anywhere with this. I'm going to restore the original system from the System Restoration Kit (Disc 2) provided by Gateway.

If at First You Don't Succeed... The formatting of the swap partition seems to have hung. (4 hours later) I rebooted. This time, I tried the generic boot: and got this: "Kernel panic. No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel" Reboot. I tried the "compact" option and that doesn't work either - some kind of endless loop. I'm not going to torture myself when I can just go with Red Hat 8.0

Debian 3.0 Install I'm trying to install Debian 3.0 Linux to one of the Gateway Professional computers. From disk 1, I entered "bf24" at the boot: prompt to boot to install using Linux 2.4. I selected English (US) install, En (qwerty) keyboard. Repartitioned the drive: 20 GB Hard disk. Partitioned as follows: 100 MB bootable, 1024 Swap (logical), remainder Linux logical. Initialized the swap partition with a bad-blocks check. This step is either taking an incredibly long time, or the computer has hung.