I have been trying to install any version of Linux on this old laptop I have kicking around. I have tried Mandrake, Red hat versions, DSL, Caldera and Debian. The only one which remotly gets anywhere is the Debian, but its install process is rather criptic to follow being fairly new to the OS. I have managed to get it installed of mostly, but even it gived all sorts of error messages and warnings.

The most common problem I am having is the boot cd just not doing anything at all, even though it works for some distros, the Mandrake, DSL, and a coupld of the newer Red Hat distros just don't go anywhere, says something about trying to 'wing it' and then nothing.

The other Red Hat distros give process halting errors, with numbers tied into themessage, such as shutting down with a status of 7, or something like that. The Debian installs but is missing a bunch of needed files and programs, although the full distro is supposed to be on the one disk??? Anyone havce any ideas about what I am experiencing? I know that I could have explained it better, but I don;'t have the actual error messages here with me right now, can post them a bit later though.

All I wanted was to get some use out of an old terminal, but I shoudl have just stuck with the Win98 that was on it!! I'll know for the next time I guess?

First of all, can you give a little more specifics about your hardware? Have you checked TuxMobile or linux on laptops website? Do you have a floppy? Debian at least can boot the installer from floppy and then continue on the net or CD.

Second, some old machines bios will not boot newer distros because it expects the kernel to be no bigger than that of a floppy. You need to download the DSL-syslinux image for it to work on old machines. Debian may be working partially because the default Sarge kernel is a 2.4 kernel.

Debian can be a bit scary at first, but it should run on your machine. I think the minimum system specs are something like 16MB RAM and 150MB hard drive...

3
Echo--Give us information--eg what is this relic? What errors, etc.
specific questions get much better answers.

Ok folks, still having problems, with all of the tried distros, even the Debian cannot seem to completly install, it gets most the way through but cuts out eventually without completing the install.

Anyways, here are a few of the errors from a few of the various distros I have tried, now keep in mind that these are all mostly very old distros, selected from my local library as the particular machine has no internet connection, no OS either. It is a Hitachi VisionBook 4000 series. There is a 1.??Gb HD, and one toshiba cd-rom. No floppy, no USB that werks, the laptop was dropped and flooded a long while ago and I just slapped it back together minus the screen(as that is what busted along with the USB port)so it runs through an external monitor. I use it mostly for its serial port as my working machines are all newer and have no true serial ports, and much of the development boards I work with require the port and do not accept adapters...

I am currently waiting on a copy of Win98se to get here, and want to have the machine dual bootable, with the win98se and some sort of Linux distro split on its HD.

The errors- RedHat6.1cd
-boot
-loading initrd.img...
-loading umlinuz...
-uncompressing linux...
crc error.
-system halted.
[END]

Mandriva2006cd
ISOLinux 1.76 Mandrakelinux iso linux! Loading spec packet failed, trying to wing it...
ISOLinux! Failed to locate cd-rom device; boot failed
[END]

DSL2.0cd
exact same as above (Mandriva2006cd) error message (except for distro name of course!!

RedHat7.0cd
...
...
running anaconda-may take some time to load...
install exited abnormally- recieved signal 7
sending termination signals...done
sending kill signals...done
disabling swap...
unmounting filesystems...
/proc/bus/usb
/mnt/runtime
/mnt/source unmount failed(16)
/dev/pts
/proc
you may safely reboot your system.
[END]

- I have no errors messages ready from the Debian install, but it is 2.1 version, and as I said it stops after a heck of a long time installing. The basic kernel gets installed I believe, along with many of the packages, but one of them is causing the whole system to halt suddenly (dpkg is the name I think of the suspect package).

Well, any help with this would be great, and thanks for the halp already regarding the needed images, but how would I go about getting the needed image?

Frankly, that machine could have so many issues that it might not be worth fooling with.

1GB harddrive is not going to support a Windows/Linux dual-boot setup--and will probably not support any of the Linux distros you have tried.