40.53 Dell Optiplex GX260 (Festival)

Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 was installed from a Debian CD-ROM (29 Nov 2002). This desktop machine is used for data analysis and desktop environment.

Lilo was replaced by grub.

The NIC (e1000) was not supported in the default 2.4.18 kernel. A kernel-image-2.4.19 was installed but again did not support the NIC. A kernel-image-2.4.20-pre11 was compiled for the machine (at the time the 2.4.20 was not released) and worked just fine. When it was released kernel-image-2.4.20 was installed and worked just fine (and the NIC worked after insmod e1000—add e1000 to /etc/modules).

Installed ssh to get things started with standard configs, startup files and passwd/group files copied from the server (Alpine). Installed gdm, gdm, gdm, gdm, gdm, gdm and then run a simple script to place the standard setup files in the appropriate locations. Installed wajig to get the show on the road!

The on-board video was at first run using vesa because XFree86 4.2.1 does not have a driver for the 82845G AGP. It is supported in XFree86 4.3 (the i810 driver) which at the time was not released. The video works just fine. Until 4.3 is officially released you can add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list:

  deb http://www.penguinppc.org/~daniels/sid/$(ARCH) ./

and then do the following:

  $ wajig update
  $ update upgrade

40.53.1 Festival Specification

Key Value
CPU Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz
BogoMIPS 4771
RAM 512MB
Disk 80GB (/dev/hda)
75GB (/dev/hda1) ext2 root
5GB (/dev/hda2) swap
CDRW/DVD (/dev/hdc)
NIC 82540EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller Intel PRO/1000 (e1000)
Video Intel 82845G/GL [Brookdale-G] Chipset (i810)
Audio Intel 82801DB AC’97 (i810_audio)

The lspci command gives:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 2560 (rev 01)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 2562 (rev 01)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 24c2 (rev 01)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 24c4 (rev 01)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 24c7 (rev 01)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 24cd (rev 01)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82820 820 (Camino 2) Chipset PCI (rev 81)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 24c0 (rev 01)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 24cb (rev 01)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 24c3 (rev 01)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 24c5 (rev 01)
01:0c.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 100e (rev 02)

40.53.2 Festival Install

Spec Details
Hostname uramys1
Address 125.83.88.13
Netmask 255.255.255.0
Broadcast optional
Gateway 125.83.88.177
DNS 183.44.72.1
Domain togaware.com

40.53.3 Install Kernel 2.4.20

At the time of installing the NIC card (e10000) was not supported by the available Debian kernels. Kernel 2.4.20 fixed this. A kernel was compiled from source and patched up to 2.4.20-pre11. The default (i.e., starting from no file) was the starting point. Below is recorded the specific configurations added.

  # cd /usr/src
  # wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/linux-2.4.19.tar.gz
  # wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/testing/patch-2.4.20-pre11.gz
  # tar zxvf linux-2.4.19.tar.gz
  # cd linux-2.4.19
  # gzip -dc ../patch-2.4.20-pre11.gz | patch -p1 -N -F4
  # make menuconfig
    Processor type and features
        Processor family
            CONFIG_MPENTIUM4=y
    #General: Seem to get ``Can't get display ID errors''
    #        CONFIG_APM=y
    #        CONFIG_APM_DO_ENABLE=y
    #        CONFIG_APM_CPU_IDLE=y
    #        CONFIG_APM_DISPLAY_BLANK=y
    #        CONFIG_APM_RTC_IS_GMT=y
    Block devices
        RAM disk support
            CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM=y
        Initial RAM disk (initrd) support
            CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD=y
    Network device support
        Ethernet (1000 Mbit)
            CONFIG_E1000=y
    Sound
            CONFIG_SOUND_ICH=y
  # make-kpkg clean
  # make-kpkg --append-to-version -gjw --revision edm01
              --initrd kernel_image
  # cd .. 
  # wajig install kernel-image-2.4.19-gjw_edm01_i386.deb

This works just fine and all standard drivers (CDROM and NFS) were included by default and the e1000 support included in the kernal. The resulting kernel is quite a bit smaller that the kernels supporting lots of hardware (700K initrd cf 2.4MB and 56K modules cf 20MB)!



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