sarpeyer

I have a lovely little embedded Linux box in my lab right now (An Arcom pegasus - arcom.co.uk), to be used for controlling equipment. However, to develop applications for it I need to install Fedora on my PC to act as a host environment. Fedora is specifically recommended as the distribution to use. In fact, the Linux box came with a DVD with Fedora Core 3 on it.

I am really desperate to get this working as soon as possible. So desperate in fact, I bought the cheapest laptop I could find today - a Samsung R20 with a 1.73GHz CeleronM. I figured this should be enough to do some work in Linux (I really only need the command line, any GUI would be a bonus)

The Fedore Core 3 DVD boots fine when I restart the laptop. The only problem is that it can't recognise the hard drive on my laptop! The drive is completely invisible to the installer.

Now, please bear in mind that I am almost a complete newbie to Linux. But after a little research I tried, for instance,
linux ide=nodma
linux acp=off (also tried acp=off apm=off)
linux mfb
linux i8042.nomux
... none of which made any difference, whereas

linux noprobe
at least told me it couldn't find the drivers and gave me a list to look through, but none of them sounded at all right (for the record, it's a Fujitsu MHW2080BH ATA device)

I had even been nice and made sure that there was a FAT32 partition on the drive for Linux to use.

So, how the heck do I get this to install onto my laptop?
Can anybody supply me with the relevant driver? (And if so - how do I get it onto the DVD?! Presumably I need to burn a new one?)

Will the situation improve if I try a more recent version of Fedora? Core 7 perhaps?
If so, where can I get the DVDs in London?
(I have been downloading it for several hours now... my network connection is obviously too slow. I'm happy to pay for a DVD but again, as soon as possible please!)

Many thanks in advance, I'm sure I'll be back later asking how to get the display working and how to dual-boot... but one step at a time eh?
I would be very, very grateful just to be able to complete the installation of Fedora first!

Yours,

Oliver