This page describes the installation and configuration of a machine that has been/is being "souped up" to perform some multimedia duties, eg., playing DVD movies and streaming audio and video (and maybe run some games, if I have time).

You may recall that Falcon began life here as a Compaq Presario 5070 K6-2/350 with only 28MB RAM available for the system.   Although memory-crippled at the time of purchase, he was (and still is) my fastest machine.   I also purchased my 19" Compaq monitor with speakers at around the same time that Falcon was purchased, hoping to have a larger viewing area for playback of DVD movies and possibly for future use with some of the newest games (GADS!) written for or ported to Linux.   Over time, Falcon has gotten a memory boost (now with 156MB RAM available) and a brand new AMD K6-2/500Mhz processor.   In addition, I bought him a new 8Gb EIDE hard drive to add later, and this upgrade will be described in an update.

In a quest to try out different distributions of Linux to see how they hold up doing different tasks, I decided to try Linux-Mandrake 6.5, a product that has received many raves for it's ease of installation and use, especially for those new to Linux.   However, before I installed Mandrake, I tried Red Hat 6.0, which I had previously tried on my 486, Tank.   In addition, I decided to try the open source disk partitioning app known as fips which you can get here.   This Presario had come pre-loaded with MS Windows 98 in a single 4GB partition.   My plans were to divide the drive into at least 2 partions (and more later, during the Mandrake install), the 2nd being dedicated to Linux.   With a future addition of an 8GB drive on the horizon, I will need to rethink how I want to do the partitions, but that will come later.

So... nervously, I downloaded fips and read the readme files to see exactly what I was getting myself into.   I had heard many claim success with this program, so I did have some confidence that I wouldn't totally screw things up!   But since 98 was on the drive, that meant that FAT32 was there too, and older versions of fips are unable to deal with that.   Fortunately, the latest version of fips that I had downloaded (2.0), had no problem with the FAT32 formatting.

[ And as an answer to the question of why I decided to keep 98 on this machine, I'll have to admit that Linux is still "growing" in the area of driver support for of alot of multimedia hardware, such as DVD hardware decoders.   Aside from licensing issues, this is due primarily to hardware manufacturers' reluctance to release the proprietary code for their add-in cards, meaning that those who want to use that component would need to somehow reverse-engineer the driver to create one for Linux, and that's a major job.   Fortunately, a major manufacturer such as Creative Labs, has seen the light (their open source site is here) and has finally embraced the open source movement (providing the code for several of their most popular devices), and Linux drivers for them are now releasing at an incredible pace!   Hopefully, Creative's decision will spur others to follow suit, as they begin to realize that they will lose nothing and gain MORE money by SELLING MORE cards!   There is a natural fear from these manufacturers that if someone gets their code, that 3rd party can modify it from the original and sell the drivers for their own profit, but open source officiandos know that releasing that same code under the GPL or similar licensing scheme, will preclude alot of this.   Suffice it to say, until such time as drivers for some of the other devices installed on Falcon, including the SIS onboard AGP video chip, Creative's dxr3 DVD decoder card, a Logitech Webcam VC, and an HP Officejet 520 are released, I am unfortunately stuck with windoze for the time being.]

Red Hat 6.0
I previously described a Red Hat 6.0 install on Tank, the details of which can be found here.   The main difference for Falcon is that his processor is way faster and he can boot to the CDROM, so that is what I did.   Because of the newer hardware, video, and monitor, RH 6.0 had no trouble configuring X.   When all was said and done, I nervously rebooted to see how well fips did with the winblows 98.   No problem.   Although now squeezed into half the space that it originally had, it didn't notice.   However, while attempting to install and configure the Logitech Quickcam (parallel port model) for 98, well... sigh.... my winblows lived up to it's name and blew itself away royally and really hard.   I foolishly figured that I could just go on and reinstall it while RH 6.0 was sittin' there on the 2nd partition, and so I gave it a shot.   Note that I said "foolishly", because that's what I was to believe this would work.... "foolish".   Winblows promptly scribbled on the mbr, REALLY gumming up the works!   It was a risk that I took and failed.   Of course, I could've done a fdisk /mbr, booted to Linux with an emergency Linux boot disk (you do have one of those, don't you?), re-did lilo, blah... BUT this whole experience gave me the opportunity to say to hell with it and blow the whole drive away and start fresh with 98 and Mandrake.

MS Windows 98
Well... here I was starting all over again.   I reformatted the drive, used DOS fdisk to create the initial partitions, and then reinstalled winblows 98 into the 1st partition.   This time, I created a 1.5GB partition for the winblows, giving a little more space for the Linux to come.   Of course, we all know that DOS don't see nuthin' bigger than 2GB, but I'd get those extra 500MB back later.   Note that the Presarios (whether desktop or notebook) use those "red CDs", that have all the drivers and stuff on them and gives you the option to do a "quick install".   Since I'm a master at Presario installs (tee hee hee), I had archived this Presario's 98 cab files on an Iomega Zip250 disk and reinstalled 98 from that using Iomega's "guest" utility.   Once 98 was installed and configured, I moved on to do the Mandrake install, with dual-booting in mind.

Linux-Mandrake 6.5
Mandrake is...YaRH ( "Yet another Red Hat")!   Duh.   :-)   And so, in an install almost identical to that done with the RH 6.0 previously, I was ushered through Mandrake's version.   I use the *nix fdisk to manually partition, and normally create mount points for /, /usr, and /home.

I found that the primary difference between RH 6.x and Mandrake was that Mandrake used it's own logo and own versions of rpm packages (ie., Mandrake sticks a "mdk" in its rpm file names).   Another difference is that Mandrake defaults to KDE as a desktop environment whereas RH 6.x now defaults to the GNU's GNOME environment.   Additionally, the boxed version of RH 6.0 deluxe shipped with kernel 2.2.12, whereas this Mandrake came with the latest at the time, 2.2.13 (but with it's own "mdk" appended to the kernel filename).

Mandrake skipped along merrily, finding my video and monitor, allowing me to use Lilo in the mbr, and giving me the option to boot to xdm (for a graphical login).   Blech!   But then that's my opinion... ;-).   I prefer the simple text login.

Well, booting to Mandrake for the 1st time brought me to it's little Caldera-like penguin and login prompt.   I logged in and started X, to be greeted with a brand spankin' new KDE desktop with Mandrake's Top Hat and Magic Wand logos all over it.   Note that they probably had to spend alot of time removing all the Red Hat logos to replace with their own!   ;-).   Anyway, I noticed some different neat features in Mandrake that will prove useful for the lazy... ie., there's an "Updates" icon that when clicked, will allow you to choose a Mandrake FTP mirror site for updates, will then automatically go to the chosen site, and will finally display a list of packages that you can install to update your system.   Pretty cool.   Once there, you select the package(s) and the utility will then automatically update your system from the site!   The utility keeps track of what you have, so if you go back, it won't display any newer packages that you've already installed previously.   Well, after playing with the updates (I wanted to download and install the latest Netscape - 4.7, for some reason believing that this version would actually FIX something...), I began to realize that in order for you to update your system without confusing the hell out of it, you pretty much have to pick the "Mandrake updates", ie., rpms with that "mdk" in the name (some of us have tried renaming standard rpms to include the "mdk", and sometimes it works, other times it doesn't).   How bizarre... Well... anyway...

Falcon is a multimedia machine, so I wanted to get the sound working immediately.   Since Mandrake is a Red Hat, it comes with Red Hat's cool "sndconfig" utility.   Ran it, pretty confident that there would be no problem, and found myself run off the road into a ditch.   The utility very nicely told me that my "ESS Solo-1" chip was "not supported" but "an ALSA driver is available".   Sigh.   So... I hopped over to ALSA's (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) site and found the latest (0.4x) and downloaded the necessary tarballs.   This inturn began quite a compile and experimentation production, as this stuff is released as source, with libraries and utilities, and blah, and I'll discuss in an update.   Suffice it to say, I finally did get the sound going!   YAY!

To sortof conclude, I've been using Mandrake for about 2 months now, and haven't had any significant problems with it so far.   Since I split my time between 4 machines, I haven't delved into everything you can do with it yet, but I would say that with the Mandrakes and Calderas (and now CorelLinux, which is receiving alot of attention lately) of the world, a Linux for the average desktop, geared to zombified winblows users, seems more and more promising with every desktop-focussed release.   Let's hope that "World Domination" isn't that far away...   ;-).
 
 

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