Hi All~
I have an old Pentium II 233MHZ on a Intel Motherboard. I am running Win2000 and Redhat Linux 9 currently. I am new to linux and my friend told me Mandrake is a better choice. So I downloaded it and wrote it to a CD. When I boot up using the CD the installation starts but i get a fatal kernel error and the installation crashes. I tried installing fedora but to the same avail. I felt it might be because the BIOS might be old, so I upgraded the BIOS yesterday but the installtion still doesnt happen. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Arun

At what point during the install do you get this message?

I don't think you have the minimum system requirements (...more feutures = bloat )
If you're looking for a faster system, try Slackware or Gentoo with fxce4 or fluxbox.

After it says "detecting Mandrake CDRom" it does print "succeeded..." though. and it waits a while and then a big kernel dump gets printed. Btw i forgot to mention that redhat 9 and 7.2 worked. I ran the installation just to check.

It's going to be a bit difficult to figure out given that it happens so early ... what message is printed out with the kernel dump, if any? Is there any non-vanilla hardware attached, particularly USB devices? I know those can cause problems sometimes.

Your bios is old enough that you may need to start the install with the acpi=off option. but since redhat nine was fine this probebly is not it. Plus, I can't tell from your description if you even got that far - I don't think you did. There is also a chance that the cd did not burn right - especially so soon into the process. Did you do a MD5 checksum on the iso before buning it? My guess is a bad CD.

thanks Guys, I started the installation with Kernel 2.4 and it ran fine. I guess the new kernel was not compiled with my comp's instruction set. Anyways, I guess I am going to upgrage finally. I am getting a Asus A7N8x-E Deluxe and AMD 2400+. Would this be a good choice?