LinuxQuestions.org - [SOLVED] Live CD with a kernel version older than 2.4 [retro]

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Thanks everybody for your help and suggestions, here's the follow up:

Quote:

Originally Posted by fatmac (Post 6423251)

There's a 'live' CD image of Toms, likely to be a '2' series kernel, (can't remember for sure).

I know that distro and it is too limited... Thanks though.

Quote:

Originally Posted by wpeckham (Post 6423226)

I would check one of the least ancient versions of DSL (Damn Small Linux).

That's the first distro I tried. I followed your suggestion and tried almost all versions, down to 0.6 and all have the a 2.4 kernel.
Thanks for your suggestion, though.

Quote:

Originally Posted by michaelk (Post 6423232)

demo linux is supposed to be a live version.
https://archive.org/details/demolinux-3.01pl5-fr

This one actually worked, thank you! It's a bit too much for this limited computer (maxed out at 80MB of ram).

Quote:

Originally Posted by dugan (Post 6423228)

Oh sorry.
This stretches the definition of "live cd", but you can boot from it, get a shell, and run "dhcpcd" on your Ethernet connection.
http://slackware.cs.utah.edu/pub/sla...kware-8.0-iso/

Excellent, that worked and looks and feels almost perfectly.

Now the problem is: find the right module to bring up the 8-bit ISA NIC. On Windows the generic "NE2000 Compatible" works, but I can't load it on Slackware, even specifying irq=3 io=0x300 (correct configuration). Maybe I need a different module? It's a generic NIC with a UMC chip.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dugan (Post 6423228)

Oh sorry.

This stretches the definition of "live cd", but you can boot from it, get a shell, and run "dhcpcd" on your Ethernet connection.

http://slackware.cs.utah.edu/pub/sla...kware-8.0-iso/

Do you know what is the minimum RAM required to boot the live cd?

On a system with 64 MB I couldn't boot it properly. On a System with 80 MB I could.

All 16-bit ISA network cards that I tried were not compatible with 8-bit ISA, sadly.

Can you recommend any that might work?

I believe the default for the ISA NE2000 was:

Code:

alias eth0 ne

options ne io=0x240,0x300

Quote:

Originally Posted by michaelk (Post 6426018)

I believe the default for the ISA NE2000 was:

Code:

alias eth0 ne

options ne io=0x240,0x300

The thing is, this particular dinosaur only has an 8-bit ISA slot.

I tried a lot of cards configured with different IO addresses and IRQs, i.e.:

Code:

modprobe ne irq=5 io=0x300

But none of them are cooperating on Linux, the module doesn't load.

An original Novell 2000 card didn't work, and lots of generic cards didn't work either.

Some worked on Windows 98 though, but they don't work on Linux for some reason.

I will get a 3COM card and see if it works.

Maybe it's that the NE module is not compatible with 8-bit operation mode?

Didn't you have to configure some things in bios for nic cards???

I guess I don't remember that far back.

The last Slackware version to boot in 64MB of RAM was 13.0.
I do not miss the days of setting jumpers and fiddling with ISA slot positions and BIOS settings to get cards to work.
I seem to remember using a lot of 3Com 3c509 NICs back then.