Installing SuSE 7.2 on an IBM ThinkCenter S50

Shortly after booting my new IBM ThinkCenter S50 with the SuSE Linux Professional DVD in its tray, I noticed that like Windows XP, it too didn’t accept my USB mouse. Using the keyboard to advance to the screen to select a pointing device, all I saw were PS/2 and serial port mice. So, I turned to Vintage Computer Components and bought a Fujitsu Siemens mouse in the same colour scheme as my keyboard.

My new Fujitsu Siemens mouse

They send it my way the day after I ordered it and one day later I received it. It has a little scroll wheel that, when pressed, acts as a middle button. It is a ball mouse, but it works as well as could be expected on my writing mat.

Another thing I received on that same day was a powered VGA to HDMI converter. It came with a little micro USB cable that I put in one of the USB ports near the VGA output of the ThinkCenter, expecting it to provide 5V. I also got a little 3.5 mm audio cable to connect it to the audio output of the ThinkCenter, combining both analogue signals into an HDMI signal.

“No signal” is starting to become the theme of this post series.

For my astronomy efforts, I have a big battery with USB output from Jackery. It has a little display that shows what it does. I moved the USB-A end of the dongle’s power cable to the battery and rebooted the ThinkCenter. On the battery display I saw the dongle ask for 1 Watt briefly, right after I turned on the ThinkCenter, but then it went back to zero and stayed there.

I replaced the micro-USB cable but got the same results.

I tried the same dongle with my Asus U36JC laptop, which also has a VGA out.

No signal.

I gave up. I got the AOC monitor with the VGA input back from the attic and put it on top of the ThinkCenter. Postponing this problem, with the mouse and the keyboard and the VGA monitor, I felt I had a shot at installing SuSE Linux 7.2. I booted the ThinkCenter with the DVD and selected Install Linux. YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) started. The installer started in SVGA with 800×600 pixels. It found my 80 GB hard disk and an LVM partition on it. I let it format the entire disk and selected the installation option “Default system with Office.”

Next

Apologies for the bad screenshots, by the way. I’m making photos of my monitor and I’m really bad at it. I can connect the VGA cable to the ODV GBC-C upscaler I also use for my SCART connections, but my HDMI to USB cable only does 30Hz and seems to have a terrible lag at these resolutions and colour depths. With that connected, I can’t also connect my monitor, so I can’t use it during this installation.

I had to enter my first and last name, a user login name with no more than 8 characters and choose a password. The root password had to be entered in a separate screen. The next screen told me what it was going to do. The file system for both the boot and root partitions was going to be ext2. Clicking next caused a green modal dialogue to confirm it all, after which it started to format my disk.

Read the FAQ if you’re bored

At the end of the installation procedure, the installer promised to install Lilo, the Linux Loader, in the Master Boot Record (MBR) of the drive, but something didn’t work there. After rebooting, all I got was an “L” and a screenful of “07” strings.

In the reference manual’s index, I found under Lilo: diagnostics. Paragraph 4.8.1:

“`L’ error… The *first stage* boot loader has been loaded and started, but it can’t load the second stage boot loader (/boot/boot.b). The two-digit error codes indicate the type of problem. This condition usually indicates a media failure or geometry mismatch.” -- SuSE Linux 7.2 reference manual, p.108

Great.

I started the machine again with the first CD in the drive and selected Rescue. It offered a passwordless root. Without lsblk(8), I had to look back at the pictures of the installation to know what to mount(8), to be able to chroot(1) into the installed system:

1. # mount /dev/hdb3 /mnt/
2. # mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/boot
3. # chroot /mnt

This gave me a terminal shell into the system, embedded in a friendly green SuSE window. In the boot folder, I found boot.b and lilo.log. The latter appeared to only contain the installation log. I had a look at /etc/lilo.conf using vim, but it seemed fine at first glance.

No relative numbering in vim, yet

The reference manual, on the next page, mentioned the 1024-Cylinder limit, but it didn’t really explain what this limit was. At the end of the chapter, it referred to documentation in /usr/share/doc and in there, I found something about large disks.

1. # cd /usr/share/doc/howto
2. # lync en/html/Large-Disk-HOWTO-1.html

Apparently, for operating systems that use the INT13 type to point at hard drive cylinders, everything beyond the first 1,024 is unavailable. An 80 GB hard drive typically uses 65,535 cylinders. Indeed, on page 2 they state:

“For very large IDE disks (over 33.8 GB): see IDE problems with 34+ GB disks below” -- /usr/share/doc/howto/en/html/Large-Disk-HOWTO-1.html

But there, they stated that this was only a problem with 2.0 kernels, and I was on 2.4.4. So, what now? I rebooted the computer with the CD in the drive and selected “Boot installed system”. That allowed me to continue installing SuSE Linux 7.2. I was asked to insert CD #2 and made it as far as the XFree86 configuration. I could input my graphics card details. There was a test button, but that didn’t respond to clicking. And without the test, all I got was a text login, just like in my VM in 2024.

Two things to solve then, in that order:

1. Lilo doesn’t load Linux
2. No graphical login

To be continued.