Dual Booting the
Clemson Dell Latitude C600:
Windows 2000 and Red Hat Fedora Core 1

Bill Moss
January 2004

This article is for owners of CoES Laptop Program Dell C600's who want to dual boot to Red Hat Fedora Core 1 (FC1). On the Fedora Project homepage, we find the following statement.

"The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software. Development will be done in a public forum. The project will produce time-based releases of Fedora Core about 2-3 times a year with a public release schedule. The Red Hat engineering team will continue to participate in the building of Fedora Core and will invite and encourage more outside participation than was possible in Red Hat Linux. By using this more open process, we hope to provide an operating system that uses free software development practices and is more appealing to the open source community."

Red Hat is terminating support for Red Hat 9 and early versions. The College of Engineering and Science is investigating the purchase of a site license for Red Hat Enterprise Workstation, which is more stable than FC1 and easier to support. Note that FC1 can be updated for free using the up2date command.

The Clemson Dell Latitude C600 came with a Xircom RBEM56G-100, multifunction Ethernet-modem, Type III cardbus PCI card and a Dell True Mobile mini-PCI card. My C600 came with a Samsung CDROM. I later purchased a Matshita UJDA310 CDRW. Red Hat 7, 8, 9, and now FC1 all required some post installation configuration of Ethernet, wireless, and modem, but with FC1 the Ethernet interface would not transmit packets and the modem would not dial out. The CDRW worked fine for the installation, but froze the system when a disk was interserted after the installation. Both of these bugs have been reported reported by other users. A Web search produced a workaround for the Ethernet problem. There is currently no solution for the CDRW problem. The Samsung CDROM works fine. FC1 was installed without problem using the following partition table.

Partition Table, Dell C600, dual boot Windows 2000 and RH FC1

I chose the default GRUB bootloader and installed it in the /boot partition /dev/hda3. GRUB was configured to boot Windows 2000 in /dev/hda1 by default. In addition to the packages chosen for the personal workstation option, I chose the development, kernel compile, and document publication packages.

Post-installation Configuration

Mounting the Windows Partitions. To mount C and D from Linux, as root add the following lines to /etc/fstab.

/dev/hda1 /mnt/windowsc vfat rw,nouser,auto,uid=500,gid=500 0 0
/dev/hda5 /mnt/windowsd vfat rw,nouser,auto,uid=500,gid=500 0 0

and then issue the commands

# mkdir /mnt/windowsc
# mkdir /mnt/windowsd
# mount /dev/hda1
# mount /dev/hda5

Network Interface Configuration. Configuration can be done with the Red Hat Network configuration tool: RH -> System Settings -> Network. On the Hardware tab, I found two items listed.

Note that the descriptions are reversed but these descriptions automatically updated after the configuration was completed.

On the Devices tab, I found two devices of type Ethernet listed. There should have been one device of type of Ethernet and one device of type of Wireless. I deleted these two devices and started over. I added a device of type Ethernet, a device of type Wireless, and a device of type Modem. I configured each device to be inactive on boot and to dynamically acquire its IP address and DNS information. I also configured these devices so that they can be enabled and disabled by users (RH -> System Tools -> Network Device Control).

On the Wireless Settings tab of the Wireless device, I set the mode to Managed, the SSID to cuairnet, and set the Clemson WEP key. On the Hardware Device tab of the Wireless device, I checked "Bind to Mac address" and hit the Probe button. The correct Mac address for the Wireless card appeared in a textbox.

On the Hardware Device tab of the Ethernet device, I checked "Bind to Mac address" and hit the Probe button. The correct Mac address for the Ethernet card appeared in a textbox.

On the Provider tab of the Modem device, I set the dialup number, username, and password.

I saved this configuration, exited, and then restarted the Network configuration tool. On the Hardware tab, I found three items listed.

I edited the Generic Modem configuration, setting the Baud rate to 115200 and the Flow Control to Hardware.

After rebooting, I found that the Wireless device could be activated with the Network Device Control which uses the ifup command, but the Ethernet and Modem devices could not. A Web search revealed many reports of this behavior. One suggested workaround was to eject the Xircom card and then insert it. I used the commands cardctl eject 0 and cardctl insert 0 and found the Ethernet and Modem devices now worked. Since the Network Device Control cannot be used to control the Ethernet and Modem devices on the C600, I decide to write a script to control the network devices.

I added the commands cardctl eject 0 and cardctl eject 2 to the file /etc/rc.d/rc.local so that the machine will boot with all network devices disabled. I created a script ifctl that begins by running netstat -r to show the routing table. The script provides an exit option, enable and disable options for each of the three network devices, and a netstat option. The interfaces are disabled with the ifdown command, but they are enabled using cardctl eject n and cardctl eject n, where socket n = 0 refers to the Xircom card and n = 2 refers to the True Mobile mini-PCI card. The script is set up to be run by a panel launcher in a terminal window. Using sudo, the script can be run by a normal user. On boot, all interfaces are disabled. The ifctl panel launcher can be used to enable the network device of choice.

Maple. The package compat-libstdc++-7.3-2.96.118.i386.rpm was loaded from disc 3. Maple 9 was loaded from the distribution CD.

Cisco VPN client. I downloaded the Clemson archive for version 3.7.2 and extracted the configuration file Clemson.pcf. Next, I downloaded latest version 4.0.3 B and replaced the configuration file with Clemson.pcf. After installation, I set up the command vpnclient connect Clemson to run from a panel launcher in a terminal window.

TrueType Fonts. Windows truetype fonts can be made available to Linux increasing the compatility between Office and OpenOffice. Here are the commands for the three basic truetype font families. As root issue the following commands.

cd /usr/share/fonts
mkdir truetype
cd truetype
ln -s /mnt/windowsc/winnt/fonts/arial.ttf arial.ttf
ln -s /mnt/windowsc/winnt/fonts/arialbd.ttf arialbd.ttf
ln -s /mnt/windowsc/winnt/fonts/arialbi.ttf arialbi.ttf
ln -s /mnt/windowsc/winnt/fonts/ariali.ttf ariali.ttf
ln -s /mnt/windowsc/winnt/fonts/times.ttf times.ttf
ln -s /mnt/windowsc/winnt/fonts/timesbd.ttf timesbd.ttf
ln -s /mnt/windowsc/winnt/fonts/timesbi.ttf timesbi.ttf
ln -s /mnt/windowsc/winnt/fonts/timesi.ttf timesi.ttf
ln -s /mnt/windowsc/winnt/fonts/cour.ttf cour.ttf
ln -s /mnt/windowsc/winnt/fonts/courbd.ttf courbd.ttf
ln -s /mnt/windowsc/winnt/fonts/courbi.ttf courbi.ttf
ln -s /mnt/windowsc/winnt/fonts/couri.ttf couri.ttf
ttmkfdir
mkfontdir
chkfontpath -a /usr/share/fonts/truetype

WebDAV. WebDAV is a protocol that provides for the mounting of Web directories on a server running the Apache mod_dav module. Many instructors at Clemson use WebDAV with the course management systems Blackboard, myCLE, and WebCT. Several WebDAV clients are available for Linux.

• Cadaver-0.22.0 is an easy compile and install. It functions similar to command line ftp and it gets an A for stability.
• DAVfs-0.2.2 is another easy compile and install. It mounts the remote filesystem using the coda kernel module. It gets a B for stability. Mounting is smooth but unmounting is not. A workaround is to follow the prescribed killall mount.davfs command with a umount command for each mounted directory.
• KDE's Konqueror Web/filesystem browser is part of the FC1 distribution even if the KDE desktop is not selected for installation. Konqueror supports WebDAV. Using locations that beginning with webdav:// instead of http://, Konqueror mounted all remote filesystems tested. Konqueror gets an A+ for stability. It is fast.
• Gnome's Nautilus 2.4 Web/filesystem browser also supports WebDAV. I found I could mount the test directory http://test.webdav.org/dav/ but I could not mount any of my Clemson WebCT course directories. Nautilus gets a D for stability.