On Wed, 19 Apr 2006, Sonali Tamhankar wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am having trouble installing scientific linux on a Sun w2100z
> machine, and I am wondering if anyone has successfully installed it on
> this machine.
>
> The version is 4.2, downloaded from scientificlinux.org. The machine
> is an x86 dual processor machine with a usb mouse and keyboard. I went
> through the four installation CDs using keyboard and mouse, and got to
> the "Congratulations! Installation successfully completed" screen.
> After I removed the last CD and rebooted, the keyboard and mouse are
> completely unresponsive. I cannot finish the installation.

Soe they keyboard/mouse work ok *during* installation, just not after it 
reboots?  Can you interact with the GRUB loader before the kernel loads?

Is so then it sounds like it is (for whatever reason) failing to load the 
right USB/HID modules, but somehow it manages to do ok during the install.

In any case during the install (at the first question) can you switch to 
VT2 and run lsmod to see which modules are loaded at that point?  Then 
before rebooting at the end of the install, cd to /mnt/sysimage/etc and 
see what ends up in the modules.conf there.

I can't remember how to check which modules get autoloaded in the initrd 
and I may have the pathnames wrong since I'm not actually very familiar 
with SL42.

>
> I have used this keyboard and mouse before with the same machine, when
> it had solaris 10 on it. Even now, I can go to the BIOS set-up, for
> example, and navigate with the keyboard. It is when the operating
> system tries to talk directly to the keyboard and mouse that it does
> not work. The BIOS for the w2100z does not have a legacy keyboard/usb
> legacy keyboard option that I could toggle. I am told this machine
> cannot pretend to be have legacy mouse and keyboard, the operating
> system needs to have usb drivers for the mouse and keyboard.
>
> I googled to find some info on the problem, and discovered someone had
> a similar problem with w2100z and freeBSD, and resolved it only by
> modifying the kernel. I learnt from this source that the usb
> controller may not be working with the operating system, whatever that
> means.

Yet it works during the install running an almost identical kernel...

> Any ideas, anyone? I could install red hat on this machine, a version
> of redhat is supported by Sun, so I should be able to install it.
> However, I would _really_ like to have scientific linux.

Try the latext 4x snapshot just in case something wrt USB/HID got broken 
between the kernel-BOOT image and whatever kernel gets installed in 
SL42... (thast sounds _really_ unlikely).


-- 
Jon Peatfield,  Computer Officer,  DAMTP,  University of Cambridge
Mail:  [log in to unmask]     Web:  http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/