TC1000-Linux-HOWTO

TC1000 Linux HOWTO

NOTE This page is still being hacked on as I work on my TC1000. It should reflect the current configuration as I play with it.

Items not yet addressed by this HOWTO are:

• Wireless configuration
• Touchpad configuration
• TC1000 buttons
• Final X configuration

Preparing WinXP

My TC1000 was purchased with a 60GB drive. I wanted to carve up the available disk space to allow for adequate room for WinXP and Linux run standalone if needed, but also to provide some space that would be shared between WinXP and Linux.

The shared disk space I wanted read and write-able by both WinXP and Linux. Since I wanted to maintain Unix permissions and ownerships I have choosen to keep the shared space as EXT3. WinXP will have access using one of the EXT2/EXT3 install file-system packages (initially I'm looking at Paragon's Mount Anywhere).

The TC1000 comes configured with a single 60GB partition assigned to WinXP. I installed and used PartitionMagic 7 to resize this partition down to 20GB.

I would suggest rebooting after making the change and verifying that the WinXP partition is still healthy and boot-able.

Installing Linux

Installing Linux was fairly straight forward. The only tricky part was installing GRUB on to the first sector of the Linux boot partition. Installing GRUB on to the MBR will only cause grief. I configured WinXP's NTLDR to boot Linux.

I am using RedHat 8 CD's I burned from the available ISO images.

My TC1000 was configured to boot CD's before the hard disk. Starting the install simply required inserting the first disk and rebooting. Just follow the prompts from there.

Disk Partitioning

I configured the remaining disk space using the partitioning scheme below:

GRUB Installation

After partitioning the available disk space the installation will prompt for where to install GRUB. The default is to install on to the MBR, this cuases problems with WinXP. I choose instead to install on to the first sector of the boot (/boot) partition.

The installation auto-detected my WinXP partition and added to the list of selectable partitions to boot. This is nice since it allows for moving back and forth between NTLDR and GRUB at boot time.

Packages

I choose to customize the packages I loaded instead of selecting one of the pre-canned configurations. Since I will use my TC1000 for my work in wearable computing I selected a configuration cross between a developer's workstation and a server. I selected all the developers tools, kernel sources, Apache web server, and database engines (Postgress and MySQL).

X11 Configuration

During the installation the built-in GForce2go was not detected and the installtion defaulted to the vesa driver. I tried selecting the 'nv' driver for the GForce2go, although the X server would fail to startup. I opted instead to enable framebuffer support on bootup and use the vesa fb driver. This works, but I could do better. At the moment I just wanted something that would let me finish the post installation setup.