good distro for an old system
 

Hi!

A friend has recentally given me an old AMD 386 with 8 megs of ram. I would like to install a linux distro on it but It won't take redhat 6.2 .. I tried.. haha..

I also have slackware, mandrake 7.2, OpenLinux 1.2, and Debian 1.3.1. Will any of these work, or will I have to get another distro (perhaps older?)

Thankyou
Chypmunk

Slackware or Debian should run fine.

k. I have the CD-Rom disks.. But how do I make a boot floppy? There is no boot image, But there is a bunch of different ones. What ones do I use?

Thanks..

I thought about the last little problem, and got that figured out, then I made the disks with bare.i and color.gz. I ran over to my 386 with the disks for SLACKWARE and they didn't work!

it does the usual linux disk detect thing and when it comes to hdb, it says "hdb : probing with STATUS instead of ALTSTATUS", repeats this for 2 lines, then says "hdb : LTN242 , ATAPI CDROM drive" then it stops what its doing, and sits there with the floppy read lite on. I don't know whats wrong, as I have made different boot disks, and the same thing keeps happining.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Chypmunk.

You could be having problems with not enough memory. This is what the Slackware site says you need:
386 processor
16MB RAM
50 megabytes of hard disk space
3.5" floppy drive

There is a boot image that you can use for computers with less than 8Megs of memory. It is lowmem.i. It also says that if color.gz doesn't work try text.gz. I hope this helps.

the when booting bare.i, It also says that you can do the mount root=/dev/fd0 and boot with that for low mem/. I will try the lowmem.i thingy tho.
Thanks.
chypmunk

Thie slackware distro I have dosn't have a lowmem boot disk, But has instructions on how to boot on a machine with low memory. I followed those directions, and problems again. :(

I have no clue what the problem is... I might try a different version of redhat and just installing the console..

Whell.. anyone with some different idea's lemme know.. Untill then I will continue to try different things, and distros...

Thanx
Chypmunk

You're pushing the envelope with that 8 meg machine. I suggest you pick up some memory - pretty cheap right now. I know it won't take SD sticks, but you should be able to replace that 8 with 32 or 64 meg of ram for less than $50, and I think you'll be a lot happier with the machine and performance...

I don't wanna spend any money on it... I just got it to play with, and I thought it would be nice if I could ge tlinux console running on it, So I can get used to some of the commands, and learn how to handle linux without Xwindows..

I still would like to have linux on it.. So if anyone finds any distro that might work, Lemme know.. I have tried a few small distro's based on slackware, But they have the same problem booting the kernel..

Could it be a problem with my CD-rom drive? because it seems to hang there every time.. I will try maby gettingit to boot with a different (or no) cdrom in it..?

ANy ideas would be greatly appreciated..
Thanx ..
Chypmunk

A search on Freshmeat should help you out. This was the first distro to come up with 8 meg support, but I am sure there are others.

http://www.greycatlinux.myweb.nl/

I think I have allready tried this distro, But I will download it and try anyway... Thanks for the link.. I will have to remember freshmeat for the future..

Tell you how it worked out later..
Chyp..

did you try peanut linux, or small linux, tiny linux..... do a search on these. I think most of them have small memory support, especially if peanut is a minimum of 55 megs install.

Got the problem worked out.. The Slackware kernel didn't like my CD-Rom.. I dis-connected it and away I went.. Grey cat linux works now, and slackware prolly would too now.. Oh whell..

Thankyou everybody for helping me get my linux box working, Now all I have to do is learn the BASH commands and I am set..

Thanks..
Chypmunk

you can try mulinux, i got it works with Xwindows on my old packardbell with 486sx/25 170meg hd 4meg of ram. and you have a lot of add-on.:rolleyes: :Pengy: Jouflux