CentOS - Apr 2007 - CentOS 5 dual boot with XP success

Hello. A happy, error-free report about my experiences last night.  Only
one small inconvenience in the install.

I have an AMD Athlon64 3700+ in a MSI Neo2-F motherboard (Via K8T800 Pro
chipset), with a WD Raptor SATA drive and an older WD 80gig IDE drive.
The system has 1 gig of RAM and a CDROM (not DVD).  The on-board network
is a Realtek 8169/8110 chip.  My video is a 6800GT (AGP).

The BIOS instructs the machine to boot off the SATA drive first, which is
partitioned completely to a recent install of Win XP SP2.

Using CentOS 5 CDs, I booted and began the installation on my IDE drive.
I told Grub to install itself on the SATA drive's MBR (this required going
to the advanced options menu), and I partitioned my IDE drive entirely to
/ , except for 1 gig to swap and 10 gig to vfat (for a simple, common
writeable partition between XP and Linux).

I installed CentOS 5 without glitches, rebooted, and Grub came up as it
should.  I proceeded to boot to CentOS.

My one problem: no network.  The Realtek chip was not detected.  I
rebooted to XP, did some googling, and figured out that I needed to
download the appropriate Realtek drivers, build and install them.  I put
the drivers on my vfat partition (grabbing the NVidia video drivers too),
rebooted to CentOS, built/installed the drivers, and then had to reboot
one more time before network would work.

All finished!  The slowest part of the process was customizing which
packages to install and sitting around waiting to swap discs.  My old
Lite-On CD burner has been moved forward through a few system builds
now... it keeps chugging.


Brian Barnes
Washington University in St. Louis

On 4/13/07, Brian Barnes <bcbarnes at artsci.wustl.edu>
wrote:
> Hello. A happy, error-free report about my experiences last night.  Only
> one small inconvenience in the install.
>
Thankyou for this info.

<stuff deleted>

> My one problem: no network.  The Realtek chip was not detected.  I
> rebooted to XP, did some googling, and figured out that I needed to
> download the appropriate Realtek drivers, build and install them.  I put
> the drivers on my vfat partition (grabbing the NVidia video drivers too),
> rebooted to CentOS, built/installed the drivers, and then had to reboot
> one more time before network would work.
>
These may show up in the CentOS-plus items as they are worked on. One
thing we might look at is using the kmod infrastructure that RHEL is
using for its modules (but I have been told it is a pain in the ass to
keep straight). I will see about trying to build a set of dkms modules
for things as I am most familiar with this technology and its 'doing
the reasonably right thing'.

Again thansk.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"