I'd like to try out Debian Wheezy on my AMD Athlon (K7) system, but the install image defaults to the 686-pae kernel, which will not boot on this hardware, even though the 'pae' flag is present via 'cat /proc/cpuinfo' for the Athlon.

The 486 kernel should boot up on this hardware successfully, but the opening screen does not list the kernel to use. Is there a way to display boot parameters for the install image, in order to have it boot using the 486 kernel?

Thanks in advance.

Hi,

If I remember well, the installation CD has an option to choose your preferred kernel, probably by selecting the expert install. I read that the net install CD doesn't include all available kernel images due to space limitations, so you might have to use the standard i386 image (CD-1). If this doesn't work, you could always perform the install with an i686 kernel, then chroot the root partition from a liveCD, and install an i486 kernel through the chroot environment with apt-get. (You can find good info on how to chroot your system here).

Regards and good luck.

I thought if you don't choose a different version, Debian installs the 486 kernel by default.