present efforts on my HP laptop

John Kohler jkohler2 at earthlink.net
Fri Nov 15 07:14:20 PST 2002


Hello everyone,

Thanks again for all your help.

Here is the latest summary of my efforts:

I first found that Red Hat 7.3 could not be installed with all the 
defaults in place.

On the installation boot propmt, I added the following:

boot: linux nopcmcia

Graphic installation was successful. Then, when attempting to boot from 
the HP hard disk, a "machine check" exception occurred, and I learned 
another kernel boot prompt could be added.

boot: linux nomce

This allows me to reboot the system every time from a command line 
prompt. (this only works on "non-fatal" machine checks.

At the nblug RH road tour meeting, James McDermott suggested that I 
permanently pass the "nomce" parameter to the kernel.  He showed me how 
to do that with the "GRUB" bootloader, but I did not take notes.  Even 
with that parameter in place, the loading from the hard disk stops at 
the pcmcia loading point.  James McDermott also suggested that the BIOS 
included at manufacture may be incomplete or not written for this 
computer, so a later BIOS should be downloaded from the HP website and 
"burned" into the laptop eeprom.  I'll need help with that.

Normally, one would connect to the internet by modem or LAN, download 
the update to a floppy and load the floppy to the "burn" progam, I 
guess.  I have neither a floppy drive, nor a usuable internet 
connection, except on the iMac.

My thought is to load (ugh!) Windows 98 temporarily on the laptop, make 
a connection, download the BIOS, "burn" it in, then remove the Windows 
O/S from my laptop.  I'd really like another solution.  

Any suggestions?


Now, I am trying to configure the ethernet device (eth0) for my router, 
that works with DHCP on my iMac. The hp laptop, when configured with 
DHCP under Red Hat 7.3, fails to establish an IP address.

An HP customer engineer at the Oracle World trade show, in the HP booth, 
suggested a static ethernet configuration. I could do that from the 
"neat" command on a terminal window as the root level operator. I used 
the following:

IP 192.168.0.101
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.0.1


It formed a connection in which I could get the HP to ping itself, and 
the router, but no outside websites.

John Kohler
Daly City, CA



More information about the talk mailing list