Installing Suse Linux Dell Latitude CPi D233ST
 

Hi. I am trying to install Suse Linux 9.2 onto my Dell Latitude CPi D233ST. There is nothing on the hard drive, I cleared it out. I put in CD 1 or CD 2 and it gives me: Invalid System Disk. Please help!

Thanks
jburfield
jburfield@bellsouth.net

Your trying to install suse 9.2 on a pentium 233 with standard 64mb of ram!

OMG... /me proceeds to beat head on table.

Now then. It probably failed because the system is so darned old it probably doesnt support booting from the cdrom and it's reading your hard drive as invalid. You would need a floppy boot disk in order to get anywhere with this.

However.

Unless you want to wait 5 hours for the system to boot, you do not want to put suse 9.2 on a pentium 233. The max ram your computer can hold is barely enough to make things chug along.

Try something on the order of redhat 5 or suse 6. I remember having those on my 333 and it chugged along nicely.

Oh ok, I thought it would be better than Windows on that computer.

A P233 should be able to boot from CD. Check the BIOS settings. Invalid system disk means you do not have a valid boot load installed on the hard drive.

I would try slackware and a light windows manager.

Is there any open source RedHat or Suse 6 I can get on the internet?

I suggest slackware with a light windows manager over an older version of RH or SuSE

Perhaps have a look at Vectorlinux, they produce a quite lean distribution that I have running on a D266XT. I am afraid that it might not really be a newbie distribution but you could spend a CD and an evening to see if I'm wrong :-)
(There is a option during the install to use 'old CD drives' or something like that, if the install breaks halfway through you should try this)