I have been trying for the last 4 days to get this POS that a friend gave me to boot up with linux. First off it will not boot off of a cdrom the bios does not support it. Just to give you a little back ground it is a Packard Bell Legend 110 CDT, from what I can telll it was produced in 1992. I busted open the box and this the type hardware inside

Pentium Processor, 90mhz with 60mhz fsb

It looks like an intel motherboard but I have seached the intel site and cannot find any info but here is the numbers off the chips

Intel PCI SET S82433NX SZ899
Intel PCI SET S82434NX SZ919
Cirrus Logic 5434 PCI
(these are the largest chips on the board)
There is also a flash chip on the board but I cant get the number off of it
There are several numbers on the board that I have run through google and Intels website along with packard bells web site with no results. Here are the numbers they may help
ITMM44814472
180596
AA625264-204
NO1931043
PCNT44720388
A941NMB

Panasonic CR-563-B (I have found out this cdrom is not IDE or SCSI drive it is a prorietary drive)

The Panasonic cdrom is connected to an aztec soundblaster card which is mounted on an ISA card which I have not been able to ID yet.

It has a 811mb Conner hard drive which I have replaced with a 1.5mb Fujutsu hard drive.

I have no idea how much ram it has. I think it has 8 or maybe16mb of ram because I even tried to install Winny98 and it would not install because it said it can only be installed on a machine that has more than 16mb of ram.

The past owner had Winny95 on it

This is what I have tried so far

RH 9.0 boot disk wHich was made on another RH box I have running. I get the initial spash screen, I have tried to install full GUI it goes through a partial boot then hangs. I have tried to pass on low mem parameters to the kernel still hangs and will not boot.

I have been reading all over the internet that linux is the best thing to revive old PC"s.

Any body have any suggestions on what distro would be the best to use with this type of hardware. I'm running out of Ideas to try

During the boot process it gets as far as

RAMDISK: a compressed image in found on block 0

then the puter hangs. Yea I Know it should be in the trash heap but hey it was free.

Thanks for your help

Check out the HCL http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/index.php but with hardware that old you may not find much info, Also do a google for more.

Either Debian or Slackware but be careful on how many packages you are installing. You can use a multi-gigabyte hard drives, but make sure you make one small primary partition and use that as /boot. Linux is able to use hard drives reaching several terabytes even though the BIOS only handles up to a few gigabytes. Distributions with a GUI installer can be glitchy on old computers.

First off let me thank everyone for their responses. The help is greatly appreciated.

Sorry about the typo on the HD specs its actually a 1.5GB HD. But anyway will try debain and slackware. I have very little experience with these distro's so I guess the learning curve just started. Also have been digging around on the net and found some mini distors that I am thinking of trying such as muLinux and Penut linux openions would be appr. Thanks again for the help

oh yea just to let you know what I was going to do with it is to get it running and put samba on it and use it as a print server, and maybe a few files I don't use often but don't want cluttering up my maching. Once again thanks

Hi,
I'd try Debian or Slackware too like mentioned before.
If you are interested in installing Debian minimalistic, you could read this page : http://users.skynet.be/six/gpure/tech/linux/debian.html

But that's only info to set up a computer as a leight workstation, I think a print server shouldn't have X.

Maybe Damn Small Linux or Feather Linux are what you need. Though I prefer starting off from a pure Debian or pure slack.

edit:This is also an interesting article : http://www.pycs.net/lateral/stories/4.html
A guy who turns a p1 75mhz, 16mb ram into a usable system. And he doesn't even use TinyX, which is used in DSL or Feather Linux. So don't say it should be on the trashpile, it still works good