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:

  # cfdisk /dev/hdb ; mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdb1

Then /etc/fstab was updated:

  /dev/hdb1 /ktnet/bach ext2 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 0

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.deb

This 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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