Re: putting debian on a dell inspiron 3500
Well, I have a 3500 and it was painless. I used FIPS to reduce the size
of my FAT32 partition (the latest version supports it with no problem).
It can use a partition or a file, but use the phdisk utility to check what
it is using, and to delete or recreate the partition/file. The goldcard
global 56k modem should work, I have one, but no dongle so I can't test
it. Do you not have the cable to allow you to connect the floppy
externally? You can order this from Dell to make this easier. I have
found hot swaping to work quite well as long as I boot with the CD drive
in it, but that would be hard for your goals.
I don't think tapes are a good option, but in refernce to your floppy
tapes, a lot of early (and not so early) QIC drives ran from the floppy
controller, and that is what FTAPE is aimed at.
In summary, get the cable from Dell that allows the floppy drive to run
from the Parallel port and you should do very well.
Charlie
On Wed, 28 Jun 2000, brent harding wrote:
> How can I install debian on my dell inspiron 3500? First of all, it has
> one large fat-32 partition for win-98 that covers the whole drive. I don't
> have anything too usefull to back up with, to format and repartition it. I
> don't know whether or not it uses other partitions for swap and suspend. I
> have a goldcard global 56k modem in it I'd like to be able to use in linux.
> It's a PCMCIA modem, I assume, because I can remove it. The trouble comes
> in because I would like to be able to use CD's to install debian 2.2 potato
> when they come available. I use a special patch called speakup, found at
> linux-speakup.org that needs to load a bootup. How do I turn on hot
> swapping of the options bay so I can boot off of a floppy, install the
> drivers from the windows partition, and install the base system and
> supplementary packages from CD? They offer a patched debian rescue.bin that
> will boot the system. I had problems on my regular computer getting it to
> install that kernel, so I downloaded their applied kernel which is version
> 2.2.14, had a ton of unresolved modules, but had a bootable system, then I
> applied the patch to the 2.2.15 source tree and all works good. The patch
> requires a 2.2 kernel to run, thus the reason why I downloaded potato's
> base setup from their site that had the proper implementation. I really
> don't feel like having to download everything again. I will be stuck
> downloading the speakup bootdisk again because my internal speech card in
> my regular computer isn't the same as the external serial device I use in
> my laptop. I think it's automatically probed for when the kernel first
> boots, as a friend who uses a similar device in his regular machine said he
> never had to specify the port. Is there a bay manager that I could fit on
> the root disk that will allow hot swapping, so I can remove the floppy
> drive and put the cd-rom in when the cd is called for? I was thinking of
> hooking both machines together and transfering the whole system over, but
> my laptop's hard drive is bigger, so I probably wouldn't get a file system
> of appropriate size. I would then recompile my 2.2.15 kernel to have the
> driver needed for my laptop built in to the kernel and overwrite the kernel
> that would already be there. Will that work right? I know the install was
> quite buggy on my regular machine, don't know what it'd do to my laptop. I
> have an old parallel port tape drive laying around somewhere I used to
> use with an old machine and windows 3.11 when I used that, but it ran with
> the colorado trakker software, will that work in linux? If so, do I just
> send a tar command to /dev/par0 to make it work? I've never heard of floppy
> tapes before, so don't know if the ftape module would work, or if the drive
> needs to always be connected to the machine I load the module on.
>
>
>
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