Debian “Etch” - 1 ; Fedora 8 - 0

I recently decided to install Linux on a Panasonic Toughbook CF-28.  In case you aren’t familiar with this particular piece of hardware, it’s essentially a laptop that thinks it’s a tank.  It’s heavy, slow, and super sturdy.  When you close the lid on this thing, it sounds like you’re slamming shut the door to a prison cell.  Supposedly, you can drop this thing on a concrete floor and it’ll still work just fine.  The laptop in a cop car is likely to be a Toughbook.   My particular model has a rubberized keyboard which will resist spills.  (Just the thing for that trip to the desert!)

Anyhow, my machine (obtained from eBay) did NOT have a CD-ROM drive, only a floppy.  This is quite a problem if you need to install software.  I could have returned to the eBay well once more but it seems that CF-28 CD-ROM drives are quite the prize.  Undeterred, I decided to try another avenue of installing software sans CD.

It turns out that Fedora 8 offers a package called cobbler.   With this package, you can support clients that boot over the network.  Since Fedora doesn’t offer floppy installs anymore, I tried this route.  I set up one of my local machines to serve as the bootserver that would respond to requests for netboot images and had at it.

Fast forward several hours of making PXE bootdisks, importing a Fedora 8 DVD distribution and then going through the whole install process with the Toughbook and I had a working install of Fedora 8.  Except that X would not start.  Since one of the applications I needed positively relied on X to work, I needed to fix this problem.  I tried system-config-display, hand editting the xorg.conf file, and then going through the xorg.0.log to find the problem.   Nothing worked.  I decided to try another approach.

I pulled the drive from the laptop containing the Fedora 8 install and installed a blank drive.  Then I visited the debian.org site, downloaded the floppy boot images, and used them to bootstrap an install using a repository on the Internet for the files.  About an hour later, I had Debian installed on the machine, X was configured and working properly, and it even gave me the option to set up the drive with a LUKS encrypted partition.  Easy.  So Debian it is.

Of course, the big question is why Fedora (which uses the X.org distribution as well) didn’t detect and set up the configuration as well as Debian did.  I could always just copy the xorg.conf from the Debian install to the Fedora one and see if it all works.  In the end, I might decide to do that.  But why?  So far I have a working machine with a high security encrypted drive as well.  Why mess with a working platform?

Hats off to the Debian folks.  You got it right on the first try.  No muss, no fuss.  Just a solid distribution.