Partitioning & Operating System

A brief description of my partitioning scheme and the installation of the operating system.

Partitions

First I deleted all the partitions created by Dell. Starting with an empty disk I set up the following partitions.

  • /dev/hda1: Windows XP on ntfs (10 GB)
  • /dev/hda4: Extended partition
    • /dev/hda5: Linux system partition on ext3 (7 GB)
    • /dev/hda6: Linux swap partition (1 GB)
    • /dev/hda7: User data on vfat(38 GB)

All sizes are estimates.

Operating system

Unfortunately my favorite distribution fedora doesn’t install right out of the box but quits the installation while transfering the install image to the hard drive with the error message “Running out of disk space”.

So what I did was I installed the plain good old Redhat 9 and then performed a complete network upgrade of the system to fedora core 1 using apt-get. :

    apt-get update
    apt-get upgrade
    apt-get dist-upgrade

See my apt-get configuration here.

For complete read/write-access to the windows xp ntfs partition I use the captive-ntfs module available here. The installation of the driver is straightforward and works right out of the box. In /etc/fstab/ make shure to add the following line. :

    /dev/hdaX  /mnt/XP cpative-ntfs  defaults 1 2

This assumes that your ntfs partition /dev/dhaX is mounted in /mnt/XP

Note that you have to run :

    /usr/share/lufs/prepmod

every time you update your kernel.

Kernel 2.4.25

One of the first things I did was upgrading to a newer kernel version. If you must compile various modules for hardware components I prefer to start with a standard system instead of the highly modified redhat or fedora versions. In my experience you will have less trouble.

First I grabed the current kernel 2.4.25 from kernel.org. (For an update to kernel 2.6 see here). After extracting the kernel sources into /usr/src I copied the existing configuration from the installed kernel 2.4.22

For the advanced speedstep features of the Pentium M I patched the kernel with the patches offered at sonarnerd :

    cd /usr/src
    ln -s linux-2.4.25 linux-2.4.25.orig
    zcat 2.4.25-jl5-11.patch.gz | patch -p0
    rm linux-2.4.25.orig

Then edit /usr/src/linux-2.4.25/include/linux/version.h and remove the extraversion. In my case this helped to avoid version mismatch problems.

Now frequency scaling can be activated in the kernel configuaration :

    make menuconfig

This gave me the following .config file

Then it was back to the old routine of :

    make dep
    make clean
    make bzImage
    make modules
    make modules_install
    cp /usr/src/linux-2.4.25/arch/<architecture>/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.25-1
    mkinitrd //boot/initrd-2.4.25-1.img 2.4.25

Don’t forget to update /etc/grub.conf and install the boot configuration with :

    grub

The relevant section in /etc/grub.conf is :

    title Fedora Core (2.4.25-1)
    root (hd0,4)
    kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.25-1 ro root=/dev/hda5 acpi=on apm=off
    initrd /boot/initrd-2.4.25-1.img

After reboot the new kernel works. ACPI, sound … no problems so far 🙂