[ltp] Problems installing Linux on a T43

[linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org]

On Mon, 1 Aug 2005, Thor Tall wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have installed a redhat 7.3 on my new T43 and I am
> having problems with the speed of the HD as it does
> not support DMA. Using lspci I can see that the
> chipset is not supported by the kernel. Does any of
> you know if any of the newer 2.4 kernels support the
> chipsets? Unfortunately I cannot use the 2.6 kernels
> due to customer requirements.
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated.
> Thor.

Thor,

I can't give a direct chipset answer, but I'd advise very strongly
you don't ship anything to a customer with Red Hat 7.3 on - it's been
totally unsupported for a long time, even by the Fedora Legacy team,
and will have a mountain of unfixed security alerts, as well as being
impossible to maintain in terms of updated drivers etc., as you're
seeing.  Similarly with Red Hat 9, and even Fedora Core 1, which was
2.4 also.

I'd suggest strongly you either install Red Hat Enterprise Linux
(RHEL) 3 (probably WS edition) if the customer has money and wants to
pay commercially for support, or if not, one of the legitimate RHEL3
rebuild projects: in particular I'd recommend CentOS.  CentOS3 comes
with a 2.4 kernel, is free, and community suport, security updates
etc. are likely to last for the next 5 years or so.

Note that RHEL4/CentOS4 come with the 2.6 kernel, so it sounds like
you don't want them, but version 3 of each, unlike 7.3, are
guaranteed support for 7 years.

http://www.centos.org

Support on irc.freenode.net:
#rhel
#centos

Honey