present efforts on my HP laptop

ME dugan at passwall.com
Fri Nov 15 09:53:16 PST 2002


John Kohler said:
> 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.

With lilo, it is just a matter of editing /etc/lilo.conf and making sure a
line exists like: append="nomce"
and save and then re-run lilo.

I dont use grub. A grub user might have help you you here.

> 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.

Many times, the BIOS upgrade software for machines is downloaded from the
vendor's website, and executed. he execution (In DOS (MS, PC, etc.) starts
a process to write out the upgrade to a floppy disk. Then, you are
expected to reboot your machine from this floppy.

Suggestions:
1) use a friend's, work, school, or *other* machine running windows to get
the program to run to make the BIOS upgrade diskette. or
2) try the route of dosemu (not for the novice)
or
3) see if the upgrade application is just a specialized self extracting
zip file. You can try this by using "unzip" from bash in Linux if you have
zip/unzip installed. If this is the case, you may be able to extract the
necessary boot files to floppy without DOS/Windows. or
4) if the diskette writing application is not compressed, you can try to
search for the contents of the image inside the app, seek passed the
executable code to just the data, and then write that out to disk. (not
for novice) ...


> 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.

When you are able to ping yourself and your router, could you provide us
with the oupt of the following: # ipchains -L -n
(if that reoprts an error like:
  "ipchains: Incompatible with this kernel"
 then try this *instead*:)
# iptables -L -n

one of the above will help us to know if there are filtering rules that
could be stopping your data on the net.

Also, could you provide us with the output of:
# route -N

(so we can see if a misconfiguration has left you with multiple "default
gateways" or other conflicting routes.)

# ifconfig eth0

Also, the output of:
# cat /etc/resolv.conf

Now this one is a bit more work as it easiest done with two terminal
windows: From one term, do:
# ping (your gateway's ip address)

while that is running, do this in another window:
# cat /proc/net/arp
You should see someting like:
IP address       HW type     Flags       HW address            Mask
Device 198.78.65.1      0x1         0x2         00:02:B3:20:E9:5A     *
    eth0

What we want to do here is see if the IP address reported is the same as
your gateway/router's ip address *and* if the "HW address" is different
from the one associated with your eth0 device as reported with the
"ifconfig" command above.






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