[plug] Linux installs cannot mount cd-rom

[Denis Brown]

At 11:18 14/05/2004 +0800, Denis Brown wrote:
>Dear PLUG list members,
>
>I'm attempting to install either Debian, FreeBSD or Gentoo Linux onto an
>IBM Intellistation M-Pro.   The common problem is that the CD-ROM is
>unmountable.

<snip>

At the risk of answering my own post, I seem to have had a win!

I scoured the Gentoo site, broadening my search from just Intellistations 
to general installation problems that contained the magic phrase "fix your 
sh*t" and Bingo!   A couple of people mentioned, in conjunction with the 
2004.0 version, that booting with ide=nodma could be a solution.   And so 
it seems to be.   A hunt through the FreeBSD lists looking for similar 
"nodma" parameters also turns up a couple of hits.   It is likely that it 
would prove the saviour for the Debian Sarge installation, too.   (Have 
located and downloaded the 2004.1 version of the universal x86 installer so 
will burn a CD and try that, too.)

So... if you have problems with unrecognised hardware (CD-ROM particularly) 
at boot time, consider ide=nodma" or similar parameters before losing too 
much sleep :-)

Now, for me, is the decision on which distro to employ....   I need a later 
toolchain than in Debian Woody (or maybe even Sarge?), security 
notifications so i don't have to do it myself, straight forward package 
installation / update

Debian Sarge (aka testing) would be my normal choice except for
a) a stated "there is no security (followup)" for Sarge and
b) the toolchain still appears to be somewhat elderly for the applications 
I need to compile.
Debian Woody has my respect for its stability but I am being 
application-driven here and Backports is a bit messier than I'd like - need 
to keep remembering to add lines to sources.list for example.

FreeBSD could be good except that it uses a quite unfamiliar disk "slicing" 
nomenclature which is going to take me well outside my comfort zone.   The 
up-side of FreeBSD's disk slicing is that it is closer to Solaris (as I 
understand it) and one of the prime pieces of software we use is SPSS, 
which has a client running on Solaris. [*]

Gentoo is a possibility that appeals because it has a pretty much 
up-to-the-minute toolchain, a lot of application support (well, ports 
anyway), a familiar disk partitioning rationale and what appears to be a 
lot of effort put into security updates.   The downside seems to be that 
rather than popping in a CD and having things semi-automagically partition, 
load, configure, etc. that I now am faced with the task of doing this piece 
by piece.

LFS (Linux From Scratch) would mean that I'd need to keep an eye on all the 
tools, etc, I used in the system and do all my own security 
monitoring.   From a production standpoint that is an insupportable 
objective where there are close to 100 mixed (but mainly Windows) clients 
to serve on a daily basis.

What of RH, Mandrake, SuSE, Turbo, etc, etc?   I really want to keep away 
from distros that have a commercial flavour about them.   The notion of 
Open Source and the free flow of information has appeal to me;  the 
subscription idea wrankles a bit.   I certainly would be willing - and I 
will! - make donations but I'd like to think that's "me-driven" rather than 
"them-driven" if you see what I mean.

Flames and distro-wars to me off list, please, to save bandwidth :-)

Cheers,
Denis

*    If anyone has successfully used SPSS (version 11.5 or higher for 
Windows) or their Solaris version, under Linux, I would be very happy to 
hear from you.   I'll be looking at VMWare, Win4Lin, etc.   The Open Source 
PSPP does not cut it in terms of breadth of statistical functionality nor 
in terms of proven rigour.   Stats users are notoriously fussy (and rightly 
so) about their stats package's ancestry :-)   They are also quite 
religious about their packages, too, so just swapping them from SPSS to SAS 
or Stata, for example, is a no-go.