[wplug] My RH9 laptop install

[Vanco, Donald]

Well, I finally got around to installing RH9 on my new Dell laptop.  Here's
my initial experiences.
This is a "legacy free" laptop (no serial port being the biggest change on a
laptop).

	The install progressed as I expected.  I installed a slew of crap
and ended up with a 2.2GB install - which is no big deal given the 30GB
drive I have.  This laptop is going to be pure Linux - no dual boot on this
one.  While it is incredibly bloated (by choice) it's worth noting that
selecting a "minimal install" of RH9 gets you a system at just over 400MB -
the "skinniest" a RH install has been in a long time.  I selected to install
most of the docs and system tools, and this adds up fast (the PHP manual
alone is 122MB).  

	Everything was detected and set up fine with the exception of the
(Win)Modem and the Broadcom 10/100 NIC.  I've have since found a candidate
for the NIC driver, but have yet to test it.  The modem is Conexant based,
so I'm hoping that it will work as well - but again, not much time to test
last night.

	FireWire and USB were detected and configured as I expected.  Sadly
- I don't have a FireWire device to test with just yet - but I've heard tell
of an external box that lets you house a hard drive / optical burner /
floppy that attaches via both USB 1/2 and FireWire, so I may have to look
into it.  Being without network AND floppy is a real bite in the can - thank
god for a slew of RW media I have.

	My next step was to compile a kernel.  Someone here had issues
compiling, particularly around building modules.  I did too - until I ran
"make mrproper" - then I was able to build several kernels of varying
functionality.  I tried to make a P4 kernel with everything my system needed
built in as monolithic, but sound freaked as I expected it to.  I then went
back to a pretty much purely modular kernel.  It's worth mentioning that the
kernel latency patches are already applied in the RHL kernel tree.  I was
even able to "turn on" the CPU frequency stuff (SpeedStep and whatever P4
stuff there is) - but have not seen any tools in userland that let me take
advantage of it.
	The bad thing about running "make install" is that there's no way to
correctly edit modules.conf.  Since I had one kernel that was mostly
monolithic and one that was highly modular I did get quite a few isnmod
errors on boot of the monolithic kernel - but that's life I suppose.

	It's also been reported that there are only SMP kernels for i686.
While technically correct WRT the install media, there is a way to get the
kernel required.  
Kernels included in distro:
kernel-2.4.20-8.athlon.rpm
kernel-BOOT-2.4.20-8.i386.rpm 
kernel-2.4.20-8.i586.rpm         
kernel-pcmcia-cs-3.1.31-13.i386.rpm
kernel-2.4.20-8.i686.rpm         
kernel-smp-2.4.20-8.athlon.rpm
kernel-bigmem-2.4.20-8.i686.rpm  
kernel-smp-2.4.20-8.i686.rpm

	Installing the kernel source will get you .config templates to build
kernels as follows:
kernel-2.4.20-athlon.config      
kernel-2.4.20-i586-smp.config
kernel-2.4.20-athlon-smp.config  
kernel-2.4.20-i686-bigmem.config
kernel-2.4.20-i386-BOOT.config   
kernel-2.4.20-i686.config
kernel-2.4.20-i386.config        
kernel-2.4.20-i686-smp.config
kernel-2.4.20-i386-smp.config    
kernel-2.4.20-x86_64.config
kernel-2.4.20-i586.config        
kernel-2.4.20-x86_64-smp.config
	Simply run a "make mrproper" in the source tree, copy the required
config file to ".config" in the root of the source tree and you're good to
go.

	The speed is not quite what I thought it would be given that this
thing is 2.4GHz, but it certainly compiles quickly (a "complete" kernel and
modules taking well < 5 minutes).  I have not really tried much else to
stress the CPU.  It's been discussed that losing the NPTL stuff (via an AC
kernel) improved performance - I plan on trying that too - when I get a
minute.  :)

	Overall, I'm pretty much "whatever" when it comes to RH9.  It's OK,
but it's really not that much more to love than a well massaged RH7.3 system
IMHO.