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Kdiver58 01-19-2003 09:20 PM

bout ready to throw in the towel
 
I have a Pentium Pro 200 I'm trying to load Mandrake Linux on . I went out and bought a cheap PCI video card that was listed as working on the Mandrake site . I'm still getting the blank screen of death when I boot from a floppy and hit enter . The bar graph gets about 2/3 of the way and it just goes blank . This is the second card I have tried . Both video cards work in windows 95 , 98 and NT 4.0. Can you spoon feed me a bit and get me past this? I have read posts where they say switch to GUI mode or Load graphics mode . I have another computer logged on and a KVM switch so I can pop back and forth post on the net from my NT/XP machine then back to trying to load Linux Mandrake 9.0 . I'm going to clean Linux off of the hard drive I'm using and try and boot from the CD instead of using the floppy . My CD will boot in my other machine so I'm swaping the 50x drive from it into the PP-200 . If someone could give me a script or another angle of attack I would appreciate it . Thank to all of you have tried to help . I just wanted to use the old PP to dabble in Linux .

Pentium Pro -200
64 megs of ram
first card I tried =Matrox Milenium ( goes blank )
in machine now =S3 ViRGE DX ( goes blank)
50x cd

Thanks .. Kdiver

finegan 01-19-2003 10:10 PM

single or dual chip board? er... regardless, its probably a framebuffering issue, Mandrake uses that by default. Honestly, Mandrake is going to run like a bloated pig on that machine... there are much leaner distros to try on old hardware, and even though Mandy is kinda inarguably the best to learn on, I'de recommend trying something else. There's Slackware, Debian, even RH will probably hack that better than Mandy. I had my server running off of a single PPro 200 up until August using Slackware... even with X and a lot of GUI goodness running it wasn't all that slow.

Cheers,

Finegan

yngwin 01-20-2003 02:43 AM

OK, hang in there! Many of us have been there too! I'll second the advice of finegan. Mandrake is kind of heavy on the install, although with 64 megs of ram it should be possible. Try another distro! Slackware installs just fine on an older system and is not hard to install. Just keep their guide at hand (Slackware Linux Essentials) either online at a second computer or a print-out. Or you could try VectorLinux, it's a "light-weight" distro with a very easy install.

Kdiver58 01-20-2003 02:52 AM

Single Processor PP-200 going to try slackware
 
I'm downloading slackware as we speak . Well trying to download ! I'm new at this and still trying to figure out what to download and what to do with it once I do . When the FTP site comes up what do I select to download ? Thanks K

moses 01-20-2003 03:10 AM

Download from a mirror (get slack link has a lot of mirrors), and
for starters download the installation image. (~650 MB in ISO9660
disk image format). Burn that to a CD, and you should be able to
boot up with it. After that, read the instructions as they are printed
to the screen and follow along. . .

Kdiver58 01-20-2003 09:05 AM

Thanks I'll let you know how it works
 
While I was waiting for the Slackware 8.1 install.iso to download I installed Mandrake 9.0 on my main machine ( hot swap bay comes in handy ! ) on a 1 gig older hard drive I had sitting around . I'm going to need the Linux fdisk to get the old Mandrake linux partition off of the hard drive I had started to use in the PP-200 . Everytime I try and boot the CD Mandrake Linux starts to load on the PP instead . Let me know if I did this right I burned the 600+ mb file I downloaded to a cd with Nero in ISO mode . I'm going to post another question on this forum asking if oldrer RH is okay to use with the older machines . I'm getting some sleep then I'm going to give it a whirl .. ML loaded fine on the newere machine .. K

Kdiver58 01-21-2003 06:50 AM

All of this is really pointing out how little I know
 
This has been a learning curve for me . One thing I am learning is that I don't know jack about formating a hard drive . I thought I did . I am playing around swapping harddrives from one machine to another . (AMD K-6 2/450 to a Pentium Pro 200) and even with Partition magic 8.0 I am having the hardest time removing the Mandrake Linux 9.0 partition . I was trying to load slackware 8.1 on the Pentium pro 200 , booting off of the CD rom, when the Mandrake screen popped up . Mandrake won't run on the PP . Mandrake has been a beast to deal with . I put the hard drive as a second drive used PM to format it , then put it as the only drive in the PP 200 put a slackware 8.1 boot disk in and the Mandrake ,linux,failsafe,floppy screen popped up . I put the same drive in the AMD and boot and slackware loads just fine. On a 1-gig drive what size should the 3 partitions be ? ???-ext ???-swap ??? Thanks Kdiver

acid_kewpie 01-21-2003 07:29 AM

1 gig drive... hmm, not really comfortable space, certainly not to have acomplex partition structure, so i'd just say...

100mb swap
900mb /

Kdiver58 01-22-2003 04:15 PM

I found a fix for the Pentium Pro
 
I found a newer BIOS for my Micro P6SNE mother board and am now able to load Mandrake Linux in VGALo mode . It works just fine . Thanks for all of the help from everyone !!!!!!:newbie: Kdiver

Kdiver58 01-22-2003 04:18 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by finegan
single or dual chip board? er... regardless, its probably a framebuffering issue, Mandrake uses that by default. Honestly, Mandrake is going to run like a bloated pig on that machine... there are much leaner distros to try on old hardware, and even though Mandy is kinda inarguably the best to learn on, I'de recommend trying something else. There's Slackware, Debian, even RH will probably hack that better than Mandy. I had my server running off of a single PPro 200 up until August using Slackware... even with X and a lot of GUI goodness running it wasn't all that slow.

Cheers,

Finegan

Just wanted you to know I found a newer BIOS for my Micrp P6SNE Pentium Pro motherboard and can now load Mandrake Linux in VGAlo mode . Thanks for your help Kdiver


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