Re: Old laptop with No CDROM drive needs network update of redhat or fedora

Moe Trin wrote:
On 3 Jun 2006, in the Usenet newsgroup linux.redhat, in article
<1149357431.435718.311780@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, J wrote:

Old laptop with No CDROM drive needs network update of redhat or
fedora.

network install - your choice of distribution.

This is a slick old Sony Vaio with no CDROM.

How much memory - todays distributions want obscene amounts of RAM
compared to older ones.

It has 32MB which is not upgradable without a rediculous
amont of money for an obsolete 64MB.
What happened to every operation system to make
them memory hogs??
Anyway, if I could get XFree86 running again, it was
running, but it claims the XFree86 executable file
/usr/X11R6/bin/XFree86 is now missing.
I don't know how that happened, but maybe an accidental
deletion while in root mode or ???

It's got and old redhat 5.0 on it.

Do you have any idea how old that is??? Try 'uname -a' and see when the
kernel was compiled. RH5.0 was the first Linux distribution with glibc2
and it had some problems because of that. It came out in December 1997,
and ALL support for it ended in April 1999.

uname -a
says 2.4.20-28.7 #1 Dec 18 2003 i586 unknown
It is a pentium. Maybe it's newer OS than redhat 5.0.
I got this used and don't know all the history of what
has been installed.

I'm more of a debian person, and don't know rpm very well.

It's got a decent man page

I want to grab XFree86 of f of a trusted website and update
other software/ add software from the internet.

You're joking, right? You want to install something current on to the
equivalent of Debian 'Bo'??? Or do you really want to install 8 year old
software?

Is there a way to do this?

_a_ way? Certainly. Just install all the needed packages, and the required
dependencies, and hope that by doing this, it won't trash everything else.
I think you may get the idea that this isn't a recommended technique.

I tried
rpm -ivh XFree86

RH5.0... OK, found it on
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/historic-linux/distributions/redhat/5.0/os/i386/

I was wrong, it is XFree86-4.1.0-3 that is currently on my system
but missing a file?

rpm -ivh /path/to/XFree86-3.3.1-15.i386.rpm

You are telling rpm to install from a filename (which would end with the
.i386.rpm). The _package_name_ doesn't have that suffix.

but it said
error: open of XFree86 failed: No such file or directory

Yup. There isn't a file by that name in the PWD, and rpm might be confused
by the lack of suffix anyway. 'XFree86' is a package, not a file.

Would installing yum to do this be a better way?
I tried that but it said I needed fedora-release = 5

I don't know if Yellowdog Linux existed at that time. Certainly, the Yellowdog
Update Manager (yum) did not. But again, would you try to install something
from 'Etch' on a 'Bo' system, and expect it to work?

You're a Debian guy - get a Debian boot floppy, and install Sarge over the
network. You'll be _much_ happier, and be able to allow the system to connect
to the Internet without worrying about an 8 year old r00tkit getting installed.

Old guy

I thought redhat would be like debian in that an 8 year
old debian can be automatically updated to the latest version of debian
by running aptitude or less friendly apt-get.
Aptitude even takes care of package dependencies.
I guess yum is sort of like that. I keep getting hints that it is hard
to
do with redhat.
Also finding packages on the internet
seems to be a hassle on redhat whereas
debian finds the packages automatically.
Maybe yum does this?
But I haven't played with yum as it is not
installed and my attempt to find it on the internet failed??

I kind of didn't wan to blow everything away and install a new debian
just yet as the are some music playing scripts already set up and
installed
and I wanted to play with them before blowing it all away.

Thanks,
J

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Debian or Ubuntu Dilemma
    ... Debian Stable < Ubuntu < Debian Testing/Unstable < Any Distro w/mutt packaging ... You'll eventually have to compile a few packages with any distro (from Debian ... Ubuntu seems to be a good balance if its default install does almost ...
    (Debian-User)
  • unsubscribe
    ... > Subject: debian newbie... ... If I need to recompile the kernel, ... Also, what other additional packages, ... >> The package you're trying to install presumably ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Re: Switching from teTeX to TexLive in Ubuntu
    ... packages everything except: only Dutch language packs; ... using the Debian packages of TL. ... You are using the Ubuntu packages. ... It is a requirement for having different packages being able to install ...
    (comp.text.tex)
  • Re: Problems with debian install
    ... >>to install debian on a number of machines in a computer ... For Sarge, the number of CDs will be even larger once it is ... Set it up to get packages from a ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Re: New user Q: Best way to stay up to date on "testing"?
    ... > understand the entire Debian environment and need a little advise. ... > I was reading the security FAQ and am somewhat alarmed to find (if I ... > packages, most of which seem to be related to X (we won't ever be using X ... Only install the packages that your really need to have. ...
    (Debian-User)