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10. Installing Libranet 2.8.1

10.1 Preparing the boot installation

Installing Libranet 2.8.1 was a little difficult. The Evo have not IDE CDROM unit. I tried to install from floppy disks but it stopped when trying to read the second floppy disk (USB problem??).
It would have been easier if I had a standard floppy (not USB), but that is what I have in my Evo.
I prepared then the system to boot from the HD with the help of LILO that I already have installed
for another distro.
I prepared some lines a LILO to boot the libranet installation RAM disk; I got the necessary info
from the GRUB lines (menu.lst) of the libranet CD1:

     image=/boot/libranet/linux
            label= libranet281
            append="load_ramdisk=1,prompt_ramdisk=0,pcmcia"
            root=/dev/ram0
            ramdisk=14336
            initrd=/boot/libranet/initrd.gz

PD: Thanks Tal from libranet mail list for helping me with the pcmcia subject.

I prepared also my Panasonic External SCSI CDROM attached to the Panasonic SCSI host adapter
(it is recognized like a PCMCIA qslogic SCSI host adapter).
I think it would be possible to use loadlin in a similar way, just in the case you do not have any distro installed.

I have tested the Suse 8.2 installation disks and it recognize directly my SCSI CDROM with the Panasonic SCSI host adapter or my other Adaptec SlimSCSI AHA-1480 host adapter (but that is another history...)
 

10.2 Preparing the system

I decided to install Libranet 2.8.1 on my system because I have already tried it on a desktop and it really
looked a very nice distro. I have tried to install previous versions of libranet in my portable but I was not able to get it installed.

I prepared a 3.5GB partition just for libranet. I did not need to prepare a Swap partition because I could use the one of the other distributions.

10.3 Installation

Just boot the system and insert "libranet281" when prompted by LILO.

The installation process is quite well guided by the libranet installation.

During the installation I selected to install GRUB on my HD. It would allows me to continue with the installation.

During installation all the hardware was recognized: Sound Card, Network card and USB devices.
(after installation USB floppy is perfectly recognized).

The only thing that failed during installation was that I have selected a Spanish keyboard (es) but when I got into the system I had an US keyboard layout (also for the console).
It was very easy to modify the keyboard with the "adminmenu".

10.4 Admin Tools

The Admin tools of Libranet are really great:  adminmenu & Xadminmenu.

They allow you to configure almost everything of your system.


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