Hello -

I'm thinking about making the switch to linux, but want to play around with it and get competent with the commands before I do anything to my primary desktop computer. I've got a very old IBM Thinkpad 365XD (it's got 24MB RAM, to give you some perspective), and I think I would like to put an older distribution onto it and learn from there.

I've been trying to install slackware 2.2.0 on it using a CD included with a library book ("Linux Unleashed"). It's going pretty well - I make the floppies, create new partitions, use mkswap and mke2fs... and when I go to run setup, I try to identify the source for the installation as the CD-ROM.

Here's the problem: I've got an IDE/ATAPI cdrom, and it lists that as number 7 in a list of possible cdrom types from 1-7. From there, it says "specify the name of the device" or something similar, and gives a list of common names, including "/dev/hdb, /dev/hda/, etc". I know from watching the output that the boot disk gives that the computer has associated my cdrom drive with the name HDB... but whenever I type in /dev/hdb or anything similar, the next output is to bring me back to that list (1-7) of possible CDROM types.

How do I break out of this little loop? Has anyone ever had any similar problems? Worse comes to worse I'll scrap it, but I'd really like not to have to.

Thanks very much,
BetterButterBuddha

Did you try /dev/cdrom

I just did... it did what it always does, and this time I'll reproduce the output directly:

----------

Enter device name: (I type: /dev/hdb or /dev/cdrom or something similar)

CD-ROM Type (1/2/3/4/5/6/7)? 7

Enter device name:

----------

And so on ad infinitum.

I don't know, I couldn't find anything on 2.2 but 3.4 should work;
ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-3.4/

no need for an older distro.just one with a low-mem option.my 16meg 365x runs DSL fairly well for the specs.(and at one point slack 4.0 installed from floppies)