I found a PC in the street waiting to be collected in the rubbish 2 days ago.
It had no hard drive but was otherwise complete.

I hate waste and thought I should make it my first linux machine, from what I've read it might be possible but I am encountering some problems.

The machine has a intel motherboard
333mhz cpu
64mb ram
I have reclaimed some HDs from other machines I have that are no longer used, which include a scsi 2Gb drive and a IDE 1.5GB drive.

I have built a install floppy and go through all the install steps using Fedora core 1. I am unable to create a boot floppy because the message says the krnel is too large.

I complete the the install and then the install process asks me to hit the "reboot" button which I do.

During reboot the IDE, cdrom and SCSCI are detected. followed by a BIOS installed message. However the system just hangs at a flashing "-" (dash) or "_" (underscore)

whats has gone wrong, what do I need to check or change?

I have gone through the install procedure a few times but always evenually get myself to the same postion.

Any help would be very gratefully received.

thanks
Lawrie.

lawriehhh; recommend increasing memory to at least 512mb. provideing bios allows it. otherwise upgrade bios. other than that my knowledge is nor worth continuing helping u sorry. hope others will come to ur rescue , sure of it L, users do usually. cheerio ! ta ta.

Should be no problem, the only thing I can think
of is that FC may have slapped the boot-loader
on a disk that's not booted from BIOS.

The RAM's a bit meager for chubby DE's, but
flux or something similarly small should work.


Cheers,
Tink

thanks for the advice, I intend to scrounge more memory in the next day or two but in the mean time the boot loader idea sounds probable. Tink what should I be looking for?
If I restart the the install process I get to see the partitions data, I am a 2 day newbie to linux so need a little help. I havent read the manual yet, RTFM I hear you say.

when you say
"FC may have slapped the boot-loader
on a disk that's not booted from BIOS."

it may be possible as I did alter the partitioning settings a little as the primary choice for most of data and partions was the the smaller (1.5GB) IDE drive. The install failed when trying to load it all onto the IDE drive so I tried to spread it over the 2 disks.

what should I look for?

thanks again

I don't know FC at all, so have no idea what
the install process does or asks of you to do.
Sorry.

What I would do is create at least e.g. swap
and root on the ide, and put /usr on the SCSI,
maybe a second swap partition on that one,
too, maybe around 100MB swap on each ...

And then (does FC use Grub or Lilo?) tell it to
stick the boot-loader in the MBR of the device
that the BIOS wants to boot off.


Cheers,
Tink

I would suggest installing Debian. It is much easier to configure what is/isn't installed on Debian than Fedora. Since you want everything lightweight, you can choose to just install what you want. The new Debian installer can be found here:

http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

If the computer will boot from CD, download the netinst CD image. It will be the easiest way to set up. You can also download boot floppy images if the computer won't boot from CD. Follow the installation instructions here:

http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/

What you will be left with after going through the installation is a very basic text-only Linux system with 1 user account created. It should have set up APT to download software during the installation. You can get a very minimal desktop environment by logging in as root and typing:

apt-get install xdm fluxbox mozilla-firefox xterm

That will install the fluxbox window manager and all its dependencies, as well as xdm which will give you a graphical login screen, the firefox web browser, and xterm (to get a command line in fluxbox). The easier to use dekstop environments, KDE and Gnome, will probably choke on less than 128 MB RAM.

YAY!! Recoverd hardware rocks! It's unbelievable what some people will throw away.

Do you have a spare CDROM drive? It'll make things a bit easier.

64MB of RAM is easily enough to run a console-only installation. If you want a window manager /desktop then fluxbox is certainly light enough, as mentioned above.

You're gonna struggle doing a default install of any of the 'big' distros on this box though. Go for a 'minimal installation' with no X server in the installation options for console-only.

You could check out some of the more minimal distros at Distrowatch.

If you're new to Linux, it may be a good idea to install (whisper it) another OS with which you are more familiar just to get the hardware sorted. You can then wipe it once the box is operational.

Whatever, there's no data there to be lost, it's a spare box - experiment like mad!

I can't answer your hard drive question, but I am currently running fedora 2 on a p2 350 with 128 meg ram and a 6 gig hd. It runs a might slow, but faster than win 98 would. 64 mg may be a little low for Gnome or KDE, but I'm running Gnome and am happy with it. The install I used takes up about 2.5 gig of hard drive space, maybe you should scout around for a 3-5 gig hard drive. i have seen them used at shows for very low prices. Nyah Levi