2012-05-18



Today my ``new'' Notebook arrived. :-)

It's a used Thinkpad x41  subnotbook.   The  performance  charac-
teristics  and age are similar to my current Samsung x20.  Howev-
er, the Thinkpad is 1/3 smaller and lighter.  Also, IBM's quality
level is higher than Samsung's.  This had driven the decision.

x41s have the problem of requiring 1.8" hard disks.  This problem
converted  in  a great chance: One can use a CF card as hard disk
instead.  This idea got me hooked.   Besides,  I  always  admired
Boris's limitation to 8 GB storage size in his main machine. With
an 8 GB CF card I would be forced to the same constraints now.

Well,  today  I  received  the  notebook  and  the  CF-to-miniIDE
adapter.  Boris had given me some old CF card to get started as a
gift -- thanks again.

I clearly wanted to install Crux on the new machine.  Because  it
has  no CD-ROM drive, I installed from a USB storage stick.  This
was the first time I've done so.  I fetched the ISO image from  a
mirror and wrote it to the pen drive with:

     <crux-2.7.1.iso dd bs=8M >/dev/sdb

Booting worked at once.

Recognizing the CF card caused problems. The solution was to  in-
sert  the  adapter  upside down.  (This tutorial made me aware of
the mistake.  [0] ) To make this possible, I  needed  to  shorten
some pins first.  Then things worked like a charm.

Like for my previous Crux installation, I followed the Quick  In-
stall Reference.  [1] But this time I skipped creating swap space
and  the  prt-get steps.  (I don't like prt-get much. I prefer to
work more low-level.)

These are the steps I actually took:

     # boot from usb stick

     cfdisk /dev/sda
     mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1

     mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
     setup

     setup-chroot
     passwd
     vi /etc/fstab
     vi /etc/rc.conf
     vi /etc/rc.d/net /etc/hosts /etc/resolv.conf

     cd /usr/src/linux-*
     make defconfig
     make menuconfig
     make

     vi /etc/lilo.conf

     make modules_install
     make install

     reboot


Configuring the Kernel took less time this time.


I needed to create locales:

     localedef -i en_US -f UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8

The command line is from [2].


Wireless networking worked almost instantly.


X came up with the correct resolution at once.

However when I tried to fix the warning:

     /run/udev not writable. Falling back to /dev/.udev.

by creating /run/udev, I lost my input devices.

This thread [3] explained the problem and provided the solution.


Again, I was confused why I couldn't log  into  the  machine  via
ssh.   Again,  I  needed  to  run sshd in debug mode to find out:
tcp_wrappers blocked all ports. Oh, I should have remembered.

Again, I missed the man page hosts.allow(5).  This  really  is  a
deficite of Crux: I doesn't care at all to have man pages.

To display the fingerprint of a machine's ssh hostkey, use:

     ssh-genkey -lf /etc/ssh/ssh_host_XXX_key.pub


I installed a bunch of programs I need to have on a system.  Some
of  them  exist  as  ports  in Crux, for the others I had already
created ports myself.


Now, my new machine is already usable. Let's go!

`dream' will step a bit aside and make room for the newcomer.  To
keep a similar naming spirit, the new machine is named `deseo'.

[0]  http://www.think4d.de/nba/nb_ssd.htm
[1]  http://crux.nu/Wiki/QuickInstallReference2-4
[2]  http://blog.christian-stankowic.de/?p=1254
[3]  http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/coffee-lounge/188298-
warning-crux-users.html


http://marmaro.de/lue/        markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>