YDL 2.3 on "Wallstreet" PB-G3/233Mhz, 288Mb RAM, 18Gb HD

[Nathan A. McQuillen]

> In a nutshell:  I'm about to undertake to install YDL 2.3 on my aging
> computer, and I'd like advance warning of any issues I'm likely to
> encounter, so I can dodge them if possible, and know how to solve
> them otherwise.

Hey, yeah. Lots of Wallstreet questions this month (in the YDL list as
well as the nation, I suppose... :-/) Having just done this on a 250
Wallstreet, and only having a few regrets, I think I can tell you this
much:

1. X runs fine as do all video and keyboard autoprobes.* This alone made
me very, very happy. I think this will translate into the graphical
installer working fine too, but I haven't used it (just prefer the old
school curses installer). *See (4) and (5) below for additional X-related
issues.

2. * CRITICAL *, sadly enough: If your SCSI CD-R will be your installation
device, you'll have to pass an 'init=/dev/scd0' (makes sense? no. worked
for me? yes) or some equivalent argument to the kernel via BootX. The
installation script does *not* automatically map SCSI CD-Rs to /dev/cdrom
even if they're the only CD-ROM devices available (although it maybe
should, ahem? Dan? ;-)) and, unfortunately, it also does not allow for the
selection of a different installation source. (Again, haven't used the X
installer, maybe that one does.)

3. If you have no bay CD-ROM, install as much as you can right off the
bat. What I used to do was just to keep the ISO image handy on my HD and
mount it as a loopback device when I needed an RPM -- if you can do that,
it'll save you the occasional lockup that I've run into when trying to
mount CDs from my previously rock-solid CD-R drive, as well as save you
the hassle of either risking your skin with a hot plug and a
rescan-scsi-bus.sh or having to power down to load your CD-R every time
you need an obscure library.

4. Run Gnome, not KDE (see many posts since 2.3 release about total
sucking of KDE 3.x in YDL).

5. Edit your Xconfig4 (is that what it's named? dang it, i haven't had to
mess with it much so I don't recall) to select the highest probed
resolution and at least 16 bit color. For some reason X autoprobing likes
to think that everyone would prefer by default to run at 640x480, 8 bits.
I suspect that you, like the rest of the world, do not.

6. Keep your mount points. No reason not to, unless they suck (e.g.:
during my installation process, the installer stuck / on /dev/hda10 and
/var/ on /dev/hda11. Now, /dev/hda10 was 1.5 GB. /dev/hda11 was 8 GB.
Somebody forgot to check his work... ;)) If you hang onto your old
partitioning, you don't have to discover whether the new installer can
beat good ol' pdisk in a dead heat (hint: not on yer life). I assume the
external drive is going to get mounted sporadically as /mnt/transfer or
something?

7. Sound server seems to kind of work -- xmms plays clicky MP3s, Sawfish
widgets play seconds-delayed feedback noises until you turn the thing off
again. Proabably good ways exist to fix all this with a renice or
something, but I haven't bothered. Could be persuaded to if you need
confirmation on a broken feature or anything.

Feel free to email me directly if you'd like a better walkthrough. I'm
currently procrastinating on several dozen important projects and so will
have a great deal of time.

 - Nathan