rh 9 install on old computer
 

well ive got this old 233 P1 sitting in my room and i decided to install linux on it...i got a guy to send rh 9 to me, and it wont boot to the cd, im pretty sure its the old hardware in it..can ne 1 help me?

gateway 2000 233 P1
6.4 gig hdd
32 megs RAM (SD duh)
ask if u need ne other info

I have installed Red Hat Linux 8.0 on several machines which are from pII 90mhz to pII 166mhz. With these machines, I had to create a boot floppy to startup, then load the remainder from the CD-ROM. I could never get it to boot from a CD because the CD-ROMs that are with these old machines are not ISO-9660 compliant. I'd try a floppy to boot, then install with CDs.

Josh

it's not that they're not ISO-9660 compliant, it's that they're not El Torito compliant, because it was invented after when your BIOS was made.
ISO-9660 is the CD-ROM standard, El Torito is an extension to it that allows you to make CD-ROMs bootable.

Anyway, i wouldn't put RH9 on a system like that, try Gentoo or Slackware.
you can if you want, but you won't be able to run GNOME or KDE on it, trust me, i've tried them both on a 475Mhz AMD K6-2 with 128MB PC100 RAM
you will need to do a bit of slimming down if you can't find a more old-system-friendly distro, run redhat-config-services and uncheck sshd, canna, httpd and a few others that i can't think of right now, look in the description, if you don't think you'll need it, uncheck it, if you're not sure it's best to leave it alone.

a good window manager with a right-click desktop menu is fluxbox, i've been using up until i upgraded my system to be able to handle KDE.

Thanks for the correction!

I've actually installed RH 8.0 fully on one of these old systems, had to upgrade to 64MB of RAM on a pII-120mhz so that it could install graphically. Also, without at least 64MB RAM, it has to initialize some swap space right off the bat to continue with the install.

Josh

(I'll definately check out Gentoo on one of these though.)

Give Vector Linux a try it runs great on my old laptop, 300hz celeron ,64mb ram, 128bit video with 2 count'em 2 mb vram. I've run RH 7.3 on the beast, but
KDE and Gnome are slooooow going. Vec uses the icewm which is zippy quick on the old beast