I have here two old Dell OptiPlex GXM 5100's, that have been sitting around in my attic since the early 90's. They are in good working order, I believe they both have 200mhz processors, and 32 megs of ram. I would like to install RedHat on them and run a small apache server in my office. I boot from CD fine, go into text based install, and everything runs smoothly until Anaconda tries to actually copy the files from the harddrive. I get the following message,
| Error |
You are trying to instal on a machine which isn't supported by this release of Red Hat Linux.
|EXIT|

and then I am forced to reboot. I dont know if anyone has had any similar problems with this, but I would certaintly like to hear any suggestions. Could I modify the instaler in any way so that it would allow me to use it on this system (perhaps unstabily, but I could work with that once I get it going). I also have a RH 8.0 disribution here, that I could try, but I am assuming I will get the same error.
I am willing to do some upgrading, to a degree, or buy other distributions to get this to work. I'd hate to see these machines go to waste.

Thank you for your help,
BlackBox

"You are trying to instal on a machine which isn't supported by this release of Red Hat Linux."

It is possible to run Linux on a machine this small. In the past I, and many other people, have done so.

The problem is that the Red Hat installer is too big to run in your memory. Somewhere on the Red Hat support site you will find the hardware requirements for Red Hat 8.0. These requirements are mostly for the Red Hat install progam.

If you cannot meet the Red Hat 8.0 hardware minimum then you could try oher distributions or earlier releases of Red Hat. You could try Slackware because Slackware uses a command line installer which is probably much smaller than any current Mandrake, Red Hat, or SuSE bloated GUI installer.

Be forewarned that Slackware's simplicity comes with the price that you have to know how Linux works to a great level of detail in order to get a Slackware system working. Slackware's simplicity also gives you great leeway in configuring your system and you can configure a minimalist system for your small computers.

I know that you could install SuSE 6.4 on your computers. SuSE 6.4 gives you a choice of a command line installer (YaST) and a GUI installer (YaST2).

Have you tried doing a text mode install? I'm not sure if it would work but it might be worth a shot.

When you boot from the CD when you see the prompt, type "text" and hit enter.

Mike

I dont know that I am confortable enough with Linux yet to try instaling slackware, so I think I will pass on that one.
I will look into SuSE, I have heard good things about it in the past, and I wanted to start learning some other distros anyway.

I was doing a text mode instal, the instaler didnt have enough ram to run in graphical mode.

BlackBox

Have you tried increasing the RAM? It could be that RH9 has detected your 32mb and it's not enough....

That is a good idea. Since they are both the same machine, I could move some ram from one to the other without too much hassle. I will try that today and let you know how it goes.
Thanks for the tip

BlackBox

Alas.. I had forgotten that all my RAM slots were filled. I could buy some more, but I think I will try out SuSE first and see how that works.

I am really enjoying being a part of this community

-BlackBox

"I think I will try out SuSE first and see how that works."

I was talking about SuSE 6.4 which is three years old. The current SuSE 8.2 has a huge installer called YaST2 which is too big for your computer.

If you want to use SuSE 6.4 then send me an email with your name and address on it and I will send you my copy of SuSE 6.4 complete with manuals by snail mail. You can send me an email through the forum by clicking on the members button.

Thank you for the offer, I would really appreciate that.
I tried to email you, but it says that you do not accept emails through the board. You may email me at the adress in my profile, and then I will respond with the info.

-BlackBox

Sorry about that. I didn't read the fine print when I set up my profile. I sent you an email which contains my email address. If that does not work then I will post a throw away email address here.