I'm on a quest
 

Yes I'm on a quest since yesterday afternoon (didn't sleep) trying to get a computer that was working perfectly fine in win 2K to work in some distro of Linux. So far the only thing that has worked are a couple of the live CDs (wouldnt install though). I tried to install Zenwalk, xunbutu, debian6 linuxmint, linuxpuppy and I've had nothing but Kernal panics not syrcing, host smbus not enabled, lupusave file problems, journal commit i/o error (and a whole bunch of others).

I've been interested in linux for a long time and I was reading about it working well on old computers. Ive got a 366 celeron with a 4G drive and 160M memory (a real screamer). This computer has had win98 winME and win2K with flawless installations. I'm no expert at this stuff but I've been around since the DOS 3.3 days so I know a little bit. All I want to do is see my hard drive boot up in the linux operating system right now. What the heck is up with this file system? Sure is weird. I was suppose to add some line to a boot file and I couldn't even figure out how to do it.

IF you guys can let me know about a simple distro that you think will work on this computer please let me know. I'm not looking for anything fancy I just want to start learning the command line stuff again and be able to surf the net a little.

Thanks

For a machine like that I would recommend Vector Linux with LXDE desktop. Vector Linux is known to run fine on such low-spec hardware.

If you get error messages when installing or after the install, please post the exact messages, so that we can help you.

That's not much in the way of resources for a contemporary full-featured Linux distro. In particular, the 4GB HDD is a problem. I have both CentOS and Fedora in virtual box with almost no extra programs installed and they take up over 4 GB in the virtual dynamic hard drive. Most modern full-featured distros seem to want between 4 and 5 GB for the base install.

The RAM and chip speed would cause a modern distro to be very slow, maybe even painfully slow, but shouldn't prevent install.

You might be able to get Arch to work if you did not install Gnome or KDE on top of it, but Arch is not "a simple distro." It's a build-it-from-scratch RTFM very carefully distro.

I'm surprised that Puppy didn't install, since this situation sounds like it was made for Puppy.

According to this Wikipedia article, this is a very old Celeron. I have successfully run Slackware 12.2 on a Pentium 300 dating from the mid-90s, so I don't think the age of the chip is necessarily the roadblock.

Modern Puppy 5.2 won't boot on so little ram.

Since Puppy Loads into ram on boot up. You need a smaller or older version Iso.

Refer to this thread on where to find these kind of Isos.

Good luck.

Thanks for the help guys. From the vector I looked at my drive is just a little to small. I was thinking of trying to get puppy working until I saw this post. It works on the live CD I just cant get it to boot. From what I read it's suppose to boot on 128mb of ram. Is this not true?

AFAIK, Puppy ought to work with 128MB RAM.

You can also look at Slitaz or TinyCore Linux. Both very small, so the 4 GB harddrive won't be too much an issue.

Will it run a decent browser like firefox? I don't care much for that dillo. If I have to run that for a browser I'll just go back to win2K.

Yup. Neither come with Firefox by default, but you can install it in either. Slitaz has Midori by default, which really isn't a bad browser at all. It's a relatively light but still reasonably featureful webkit based browser. Not sure what the default is in TinyCore but it has packages for both Firefox and Chromium.

Unbelievable man!!!!!!

I couldn't get tinycore to work either, I had some bad sector errors. So I did a chkdsk and I had no bad sectors. Then I wrote all 0s to the drive Partitioned/formated and reinstalled win 2K (just to make sure everything was still working). No errors no problems everything working flawlessly. So I try the tinycore CD again and I'm getting the same errors I was before. I goggle the error and I find out that other people getting the same error are having DVD/CD drives going bad. So I swap out the CD drive and BOOM tinycore comes up. How much you want to bet some of these other distros I've been trying to get working (unsuccessfully) will now work?

This is the most frustrating computer problem I have ever had in my life. The errors I was getting from other distros where leading me towards a hardware problem but it wasn't consistent from one distro to another. So I didn't think it was hardware mainly because win2K worked fine, the CD drive worked fine for listing to music, watching videos and everything else. I was starting to think that my hardware just wasn't compatible with anything linux.

One thing good out of all this is I think tinycore might be a good way for me to start out (thanks a bunch, reed9). After reading some of the documentation it looks pretty beginner friendly.

I'm sure I'll be back with questions but (for now) I'm good.

I hate to even admit it but I bet I have at least 20 hours into this.