I recently bought a "new" book at a Used Bookstore. This book included, unopened, a CD with Red Hat 5.1. I am trying to set this up on a CompuAdd i486 with 405Mb HD. I bought the computer used, and don't have a clue what other hardware types are residing within. It has a 56K modem, a sound card (or 2), a 28x CD-Rom, 3.5" floppy, and a CompuAdd Monitor.

I have been able to load RH5.1 and get a prompt "[root@localhost /root]#". Is there some utility I can load and run which will poll my system and tell me what's in it? The documentation tells me I have been taking a big chance in even loading RH5.1 without some knowledge of chipsets, monitor types, etc.

I hope to be receiving and installing RH 7.2 very soon, but want to play, and get to know Linux better before I do.

cat /proc/pci

That will at least tell you about the pci stuff in there, if any... but if It has a working CDrom, its not an ancient 486, probably a DX2 or 4. To see what the kernel found while booting:

dmesg | more

Most of the peripheral goop on that board is going to be ISA though, and there's no real way to probe it. Crack the case and check out the boards I guess. Remember, its a 486, it ain't worth 2 grand anymore. I have one on the network named printerstand, guess what it does?

To allay some fears: you're probably not going to have chipset conflicts with your motherboard, way to old, way to solid. Yes, it is possible to fry your monitor, video card (yours is probably built into the board), or both, if you mis-tweak X in configuration.

I have never blown anything up, although by now I should have. Its really hard to hurt a 56k modem, and almost tougher to hurt a sound card, although I hope you don't have built in (to the motherboard) sound... because at that age its most likely 8-bit. Let's not go there. Jimi Hendrix would sound like the chipmunks.

You might want to post the entirety of dmesg and /proc/pci (if there is one, I hope. If not it just means your machines is 100% ISA).

Cheers,

Finegan

lspci -v

that should also give you some info that might not be reported by /proc/pci