New subject: need to be able to create a (clone) installation for a different platform

30 Oct 2005


      some background:
I have a xeon machine running suse8.2 and fc4 dialects
of linux, an LFS (linux from scratch) instance, plus
doze-xp, all booting thru grub, and I write linux
c/c++ code for autonomous robots, so I know a wee
little bit about what's going on behind the bling
bling.
My new housing situation allows me to piggyback my
landlord's wireless cable internet connection but my
computer room has terrible link signal because the
access point is way on the other side of the
house...plus my dual xeon doesn't work well in smp or
hyperthreading mode with the limited support b/g
wireless cards that are available for linux.  I ended
up having to use the rt2500 in non-smp mode: a
non-optimal solution!
Anyway, my solution is to install a bare linux distro
on a legacy MB8500-TVX mobo (pentium classic) that
will sit in an optimum wireless reception point in my
apartment.  Then I'll use that machine as a firewall
and wireless ethernet bridge: wireless on one side and
wired 100bt on the other.  The machine will provide
iptables firewalling/NAT, caching only DNS, mail
server, etc.  The target platform is pentium classic,
there is no working floppy controller on the machine
(presumable fried by the previous owner because there
was no key on the ribbon connector port), and the old
1995 BIOS is too buggy to allow booting the CDROM. 
That leaves me with only one option if I intend to use
that machine: I must prepare the hard disk on my xeon
machine and move it to the target platform.
I don't have time or motivation to recompile my LFS
distro for the pentium classic because I originally
prepared it specifically for the xeon and that took me
two months.  Enter option 2) I tried to use the FC4
distro CDs (on my xeon) to install on a usb2 connected
hard disk that I would move to the target machine as
the primary IDE hard disk.
It seems that even though the FC4 CDs are listed as
pentium friendly the folks who prepared them may have
generated kernels that don't work on the pentium
classic, or at lease the penium classic in combination
with an ISA/PCI combination architecture.  OOPS!  I
tried a workaround of genning my own 2.6.11 kernel and
sticking it into the target disk as a bootable grub
image, but then once the kernel is running it cannot
run init which resides on an ext3 partition...All I
did was take the stock CD kernel and change the target
platform setting to pentium classic.  Again, I suspect
compilation that was done for the higher end pentium
platforms to be on the CDs.
After reading the FC4 release notes the indication is
that pentium classic (should) be supported...so, the
question is: did the guys who prepared the ISOs make a
goof?  Did they test the ISOs on all supported
platforms before releasing them?  and I'm quite
hesitant to suggest the last option because it makes
an easy out even if it isn't true: Did the CD install
procedure that I did on the xeon pick a kernel package
that was optimized to what it thought my platform was?
Comments, questions, suggestions?
tanks
-Prowel
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