I finally tried Fedora out. I tried it on a PL1600.
I had Debian loaded on the PL1600 and I didn't feel like making multiple floppy boot disks for Fedora, so I grabbed vmlinuz and initrd.img from the /images/PXE folder on the Fedora install CD #1. I added the vmlinuz and the initrd.img to my /etc/lilo.conf, rebooted, chose the new lilo entry, when placed me into the Fedora installer.
The install was straightforward on the Smart-2/DH controller. I performed an NFS install directly from ISO images (i.e. I didn't unpack the ISO's to a common directory).
I did add "nousb" to the kernel boot parameters section so my mouse will work. I forgot to start the install with the "nousb" option, so I did do the install in text mode.
I did a personal workstation install and chose some additional package groups.
Firstboot went Ok, but things went wrong when the system tried to allow me to log into the gui through the graphical username/password prompt. (I left gnome as the default desktop). The system dragged on and was not very responsive to key strokes, mouse movements, nor pressing the caps lock and num lock. The system seamed heavily loaded.
Finally after many attempts (booting to runlevel 1 was ok, and running startx was ok) I gave up and decided to patch the box.
I booted to single user mode, installed apt-get and synaptic from http://apt.freshrpms.net via the handy ftp rpm command:
and updated the box (first I set up my proxy in /etc/profile and in /etc/apt/apt.conf) :
apt-get update && apt-get -y dist-upgrade
I rebooted the box and it came up just fine in the graphical mode and let me log in graphically. Looks like there were some errors in the original Fedora install.
oops, looks like I spoke too soon, I'm seeing the same behavior, but at least I'm logged into the GUI now. But at a text console I can not really type my login name (only the first couple of characters showed up). Looks like I'll have to dig harder on this one.
I guess in all fairness I should make mention of the odd hardware in this box, probably I need to start yanking some stuff:
e1000 nic (unused)
e100 nic (in use)
tlan nic (embedded)
ISA audio card (used)
ISA audio card (unused)
DVD drive
CDRW drive
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