40.59 Optima WorkPro (Bach)
Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 was installed from a Progeny netinst CD-ROM (28 June 2002). This desktop machine is to be used for data analysis by a government department.
After installation, a new IDE card was installed (CMD680) with two IDE 60GB hard drives. This required at least version 2.4.19 of the kernel. I have also had feedback from another user at the University of London who has three cards running on a machine with kernel 2.4.19.
40.59.1 Bach Specification
| Spec | Details |
|---|---|
| CPU | Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.70GHz |
| BogoMIPS | 3381 |
| RAM | 650M |
| Disk | ST360021A, ATA DISK drive 60GB (/dev/hda) |
| ST360021A, ATA DISK drive 60GB (/dev/hdb) | |
| DVD-ROM | SONY DVD-ROM DDU1621 S1.6 (/dev/hdc) |
| NIC | Intel Corp. 82820 (ICH2) Chipset Ethernet Controller (eepro100) |
| Video | nVidia Corporation NV6 [Vanta] |
| Audio | Intel 810 + AC97 Audio (i810, i810_audio, ac97_codec) |
The lspci command gives:
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 82845 845 (Brookdale) Chipset Host Bridge (rev 04)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82845 845 (Brookdale) Chipset AGP Bridge (rev 04)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801BA/CA PCI Bridge (rev 05)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801BA ISA Bridge (LPC) (rev 05)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801BA IDE U100 (rev 05)
00:1f.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801BA/BAM USB (Hub #1) (rev 05)
00:1f.4 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801BA/BAM USB (Hub #2) (rev 05)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801BA/BAM AC'97 Audio (rev 05)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV6 [Vanta] (rev 15)
02:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp. 82801BA/BAM/CA/CAM Ethernet Controller (rev 03)40.59.2 Bach Install
| Spec | Details |
|---|---|
| Hostname | bach |
| Address | 155.229.8.158 |
| Netmask | 255.255.255.192 |
| Broadcast | optional |
| Gateway | 155.229.8.190 |
| DNS | 183.44.72.1 |
| Domain | togaware.com |
Passwords using MD5 was turned off (DES instead used) as I think this is the same as the server of the network into which this host will connect.
The second IDE disk was formatted:
Then /etc/fstab was updated:
After installing Debian a serious performance hit was noticed every time the disks were busy. In the X Window System, for example, the mouse would be extremely sluggish (for several seconds or more) and there was no hope of typing. It turned out that the parameters for the hard disk required tuning. Installing hdparm allowed the tuning to happen. See Section ?? for details.
40.59.3 Install Kernel 2.4.19
A new IDE controller (Silicon Image CMD680) was installed delivering
disks /dev/hde and /dev/hdg.
At the time of installing the CMD680 IDE controller chip kernel 2.4.19 (which supports this chip, but not kernel 2.4.18) was not available as a Debian package but had just been released. A kernel was compiled from source to get support for this new controller. The default (i.e., starting from no file) was the starting point. Below is recorded the specific configurations added.
# cd /usr/src
# wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/linux-2.4.19.tar.gz
# tar zxvf linux-2.4.19.tar.gz
# cd linux-2.4.19
# make menuconfig
Processor type and features
Processor family
CONFIG_MPENTIUM4=y
Block devices
RAM disk support
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM=y
Initial RAM disk (initrd) support
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD=y
ATA/IDE/MFM/RLL support
IDE, ATA and ATAPI Block devices
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_CMD64X=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_CMD680=y
Sound
CONFIG_SOUND_ICH=y
# make-kpkg clean
# make-kpkg --append-to-version -p4 --revision dha01
--initrd kernel_image
# cd ..
# wajig install kernel-image-2.4.19-p4_dha01_i386.debThis works just fine and all standard drivers (CDROM and NFS) were included by default. The resulting kernel is quite a bit smaller that the kernels supporting lots of hardware (700K initrd cf 2.4MB and 56K modules cf 20MB)!
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