On Fri, 20 Sep 2002 09:36:54 +0200
Thomas Ribbrock <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have an old 486-based laptop (Escom Paradigma (aka Featron FT4000,
> I think)) which I would like to use as a terminal. Therefore, I'd
> like to install some kind of Linux on it. I already tried some of
> the floppy-based Linux', but most of them failed to boot, so I
> decided to give good ol' Red Hat a try. The laptop has only 8MB, so
> trying 7.x was out of the question. I tried 5.2, but it seems too
> old to deal with some of the hardware. Hence, I'm now trying RHL
> 6.2.
>
> As I have no CD-ROM for that laptop (and it's certainly not
> worthwhile buying one...), I'm trying to install via network. I have
> a 3c589 PCMCIA NIC in the laptop.
>
> The RHL 6.2 "pcmcia" floppy boots fine, recognizes the hard drive (a
> 1GB Toshiba drive - the BIOS is complaining, presumably because it's
> too old for such a "large" drive) and finds the 3c589. The NIC then
> gets assigned IRQ 3.
>
> After entering all network information, the laptop successfully
> mounts the installation CD via NFS (so I assume the 3c589 is working
> as such) and starts reading from it, however, a little while later
> everything stops. On one of the screens I get an error message "lost
> interrupts on NIC" (or similar), then errors from NFS. Seemingly,
> the NIC isn't getting its interrupts properly. Now, on bootup, I can
> see that one of the serial ports also has IRQ 3, so maybe that's the
> reason for the conflict. My question is therefore: Is there a way to
> force the installer to use another IRQ for the NIC?
>
> Any other suggestions are also welcome (including suggestions for
> other *nix that might be better suited for this task - I've already
> tried OpenBSD 3.1, but it doesn't seem to find the hard drive. It
> *does* assign the 3c589 to IRQ 14, though...).
>
>
You could try going into the laptop CMOS Setup and changing the IRQ
for the 2nd Serial Port from 3 to something else, or disabling it
completely if you won't need it - just to see if the install completes
properly..
Most NIC manufacturers have utilities available for download that
allow one to reconfigure the LAN card IRQ and base address, and some
even allow one to disable plug-n-play. The download file will usually
make a DOS bootable floppy with the utilities on it. See:
http://support.3com.com/pc_cards.htm
Cheers,
Tom
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