Dual installing Fedora Core 3 and Windows 98 SE on a Compaq Armada 7800

Author: [email protected]
Version 0.1
Last change: Wed Feb 24 2005, 17:20.

Introduction

This page describes my experiences on doing a dual installation of Fedora Core 3 and Windows 98 SE on a Compaq Armada 7800 laptop with no OS on it. I'm trying to make things rather detailed and step by step, so this is aimed at the less experienced user. I hope this may be of use to some of you doing similar things.

Why Windows 98?

You might wonder "Why would anybody still install an outdated OS like Windows 98?" Well, my main reason for installing it is, that it is the most lightweight OS I know of that is supported by Check Point's Secure VPN Client. This client is the (only) software that allows me to remotely connect to my office (Windows XP) PC. I'm hoping Check Point will come with an up to date Linux version - I think there's one for Red Hat 7.1 - of their client.

Apart from the above mentioned necessity, Windows 98 boots nice and fast, which allows me to logon quickly to my office PC.

The machine

Machine is a Compaq Armada 7800 Notebook PC 6400/T14/14.0/V/0/3, which is a Pentium II, 300MHz, with 192Mb of RAM and approx. 8 Gb of harddisk space. It has a bay for which a have a CD/DVD player and a floppy (both of which cannot be plugged in at the same time). I'm using an Orinoco Gold (Lucent Technologies) PCMCIA wireless network card to connect to the LAN / Internet.

The end result

Before I start talking about the preparation and the details of the steps I think it's good to specify the end restult in more detail. I wanted an installation that allows me to choose between Windows 98, Fedora and the existing Compaq Diagnostics at boot. I wanted the harddisk space for Fedora to be as big as possible.

The prerequisites and preparation

Since switching bays between floppy and cd is only possible with support from the OS, I chose to do everything from CD's / the Internet and nothing from floppies. I used:
  1. my Windows 98 SE cd (obviously)
  2. the Fedora cd "boot.iso" (a cd to boot Fedora and start installation)
  3. a broadband Internet connection or a lot of patience to install Fedora over the Internet (I didn't feel like burning the 4 CD's at the time of installation)
  4. a floppy containing Windows 98 drivers for the Orinoco network card
  5. a Linux System Rescue CD (see SystemRescueCd homepage) to boot from and use fdisk for partiotioning.
  6. a Windows 98 bootcd, to boot into "Windows 98-DOS". A floppy won't do in this case, since my laptop can only use either a floppy or a cdrom player. Swapping these two is only possible (as far as I know) by switching off the computer and rebooting or once booted into Windows. Since we'll have to execute a number of commands in DOS, involving the CD, we have to boot from CD.

Outline of the proces

These are the main steps I followed.
  1. Partitioning the harddisk
  2. Installing Windows 98
  3. Installing Fedora
  4. 'Tuning' Fedora

1. Partitioning and preparing the harddisk

My harddisk will have 3 partitions
  1. A tiny compaq diagnostics partition (was already present)
  2. A 1 Gb Windows 98 partition
  3. A Fedora partition of approx 7 Gb

Deleting the old partitions

First step is to delete all the old partitions, except the Compaq diagnostics. Easiest is to do this with Linux fdisk. I first tried it with the Windows 98 fdisk, but that didn't give me a lot of information about the partitions. Since I wanted to be sure not to delete my Compaq Diagnostics partition I chose to use Linux fdisk. To do this I booted from the Linux System Rescue CD. After booting you get a command line. If the CD doesn't boot succesfully on your system, try playing with the boot parameters.

The following is a description of how I used fdisk to delete my partitions. Remember to read the fdisk manpage (by typing man fdisk) to make sure all the commands mentioned below mean the same thing in the version of fdisk you're using! Also, obviously, all data on the partitions you're going to delete will be lost (probably forever)! I typed fdisk -l and got:

Boot Start End Blocks IdSystem
dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 3 16 105840 83Linux
dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part2 17 1032 7680960 83Linux
dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part3 * 1 2 15088+ 12Compaq Diagnostics
dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part4 1033 1058 196560 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part5 1033 1058 196528+ 82Linux swap

Now it's clear to see partitions 1,2, 4 and 5 should be deleted. To do this type fdisk /dev/hda. You'll probably get a warning about your number of cylinders being larger than 1024. This is no problem. Now type
d to delete a partition
1 to delete the 1st partition
p to print the new partition table (changes should not become effective until you quit fdisk using w, but this can be considered a preview of the intermediate result, to find out what partition number to delete next)
d
2 to delete the 2nd partition
p
d
4 to delete the 4th partition
p
Now only the Compaq Diagnostics partition is left. If something went wrong in the process you should exit fdisk by pressing q (to quit without changes). If all looks good, exit using w to write the partition table to disk and exit.

Creating a Windows 98 partition

Creating the partition for Windows 98 is easiest to do with the Windows 98 boot CD. Boot from it and choose "cd rom support" from the menu. Type fdisk, choose 1, 1, it starts verifying data the integrity of the disk, choose n because we don't want this partition to take up all the remaining disk space. Enter 1000 for 1000 Mb (=1Gb). Now we still have to set this partition active. Choose 2 from the main menu and again 2 as the active partition. Leave fdisk.

Reboot the computer now!

Boot from the Windows 98 boot CD again. Now type format c: to format the newly made partition. This will take a bit of time. The partitioning and preparing of the harddisk is now done. Next step is the installation of windows 98.

2. Installing Windows 98

In writing this paragraph I have heavily borrowed from Larry's excellent step-by-step guide to install Windows 98 on a new hard disk We'll continue from the previous paragraph. Now type:

c:
md win98
cd win98
md options
cd options
md cabs
cd cabs
copy E:\win98\*.* (where E: is my CD-ROM drive, the drive letter is displayed in a message while booting from the CD)
setup /ie (/ie is in order to skip making a boot floppy, which makes sense, since we don't have a floppy drive active)

Windows starts installing now. In my case the install took about one hour all in all, during which hardly any interaction takes place. Windows installer first checks the disk by running scandisk. Choose C:\WINDOWS as your install directory. I selected a custom install, to minimize my Windows 98 diskspace by deselecting the stuff I didn't need. What you choose during the install is up to you. The process should be straightforward. At one point the installer asks you to reboot. Remove the Windows 98 CD from the machine as requested. If some of your Windows 98 drivers (e.g. for network card, etc.) are on floppies, this is a good time to switch to CD bay to a floppy bay.

After booting Windows 98 starts, saying "Getting ready to run Windows for the first time". Enter your product key. Windows starts. I installed my network card drivers from floppy (I use a 3Com PCMCIA 3CCe589ET LAN network card). Once the network card is up and running the rest of the drivers can be installed over the Internet from the Compaq support site.

The windows 98 part of this installation is now done. Next step is to install Fedora.

3. Installing Fedora Core 3

Installing Fedora is relatively easy, since it creates its own partitions. In my case though, for some unknown reason, the graphical installer broke down two times in a row at exactly the same position, so I opted for the text installer the third time. You can boot from the Fedora special boot cd and then do a network install. The first CD of the regular (4) CD's should also be able to do this if you boot with the askmethod boot parameter. That however didn't work for me, since after making one typo in the ftp url during installation it gave up trying and started to install from CD.

The reason I like to do a network install is, that 1) I don't have to burn 4 CD's 2) I've had some problems with the Fedora installer not being able to handle my CD player (giving strange errors) on some (old, some of them SCSI) computers. If you want to know if installing from the CD's works for you, just burn one first and then do a mediacheck at the beginning of the installation. In my case, the CD's were perfect, but the mediacheck failed because it couldn't handle my CD player. On my Armada, because of these experiences, I didn't even try for the CD installation, actually.

So I started with booting with the linux text boot parameter. Then chose an ftp install. You can find the mirrors on the Fedora site. I chose a custom install with an automatic partition, choosing "keep all partitions and use existing free space". Be sure NOT to delete any partitions (like the windos 98 partition you just made in the previous steps) by choosing the wrong option here!

When configuring the bootloader it was not possible in text mode to add an entry for the Compaq Diagnostics partition, so I had to postpone that to later (this is one of the several subtle differences one comes across between the graphical and textual installer). I edited the entry for Windows 98 though, giving it an appropriate name. I set my hostname, manual IP address, firewall, SE Linux active, English, no additional languages (of course you can choose any options you want for these settings, I'm just specifying what worked for me).

In the package selection it makes sense not to spend ages trying to decide what and what not to include, since it's better to check first if the installation goes well, i.e. Fedora installing well / installer not breaking down, Windows 98 still able to boot after Fedora install etc. If you have to redo the installation all this package tuning is wasted. You can always do it later using the "add / remove appliactions" feature in Fedora. Although I believe, that X and one of the window managers should be installed to run this, so be sure to select those. In my case I chose, X, Gnome and the administrative tools.

The installation is now complete. After the installation about 1.3 Gb of disk space is used by Fedora with these selections. Which leaves me plenty of space for extra applications and data.

4. Adjusting Fedora after install

Now, almost everything worked out of the box in my case, except sound. Here's what I did to correct that and some other settings.

Screen resolution

When booting for the first time adjust your screen to 1024x768 and thousands of colours (via the settings tab in Gnome). It's possible to do this during install, but I overlooked it I guess. This should get rid of the "mini-display effect". Also I set my monitor type to LCD panel (1024x768). I suppose it's possible to set the exact monitor type of this Compaq, but so far I didn't do this. I have no idea if that will improve the display.

Installing some packages

I installed packages Firefox, GAIM, xmms, cdrecord (mandatory somehow if you want to install audio stuff, but otherwise rather useless in a laptop without CD burner). Also installed XFCE. A lightweight window manager like XFCE works great on an old machine like this. (Although even Gnome runs well with 192 MB).

Audio configuration

The soundcard in this machine can run with the alsa es18xx driver. To activate it append this to your /etc/modprobe.conf.

# Stuff below copied from http://toman.blogspot.com/2004_06_01_toman_archive.html

# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-es18xx
options snd-es18xx enable=1 isapnp=0 port=0x220 mpu_port=0x388 fm_port=0x330 irq=5 dma1=1 dma2=0

# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0

# card #1
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss
 And reboot the machine. You may need to unmute some of the channels using alsamixer. Plug in your favourite CD and celebrate!

If you find any additions or improvements to this text, please email me at [email protected]

Disclaimer: The above text is a story about my experiences. I give no guarantee in any form that any of the tings written are correct or apply to other people than me or apply to other situations that my own. Use this text at your own risk.

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