Alright, heres the situation:
I have a computer with the following specs:

Intel P166
16 meg ram
24x cd-rom drive
standard video card that is recognized by linux
2 network cards
a 2 gig harddrive but i will be getting a bigger one within a month or so

Linux distro: Redhat 6.2 (nothing higher will work)

What I want to do with it:
at this point with the limited disk space, I wat to set up a temporary web/mail/ftp/fileserver basically I will be doing a server install. I just want to learn about how to work it. Then in about a month I am getting a bigger Hard drive (ill be out of school for a break and working, so ill have money) and run a permanent server.

The Problem:
The computer ran win98 just fine. and I have run Linux or old old 486 machines with no problems. so I figured this computer would scream with linux on it. Wrong. I run the install and everything goes according to plan and works just fine. Install program doesnt crash, everything works great.

Then comes the restart. I restart the machine, and up pops LILO, then up pops Linux. after that it does this "Loading Linux............" and just stops. Nothing. in disbilief I restart and pop my boot disk in, and try it again. this time it gets past the Loading Linux part, only to tell me...uh...I think some sort of fatal error or kernal panic and then it says "--system halted"

Again nothing more...I take the hard drive out and plug it up the computer that I am using currently and everything works fine, Linux boots up great. Could I not have enough memory? I mean like I said I have run linux on 486's with 8 meg of memory and they have worked fine...

a very puzzeled,
Mike

Have a look at www.distrowatch.com to choose a newest distrib'... ClarkConnect may do the job, based on RedHat and kept up to date...

I was unable to find clarkconnect.

Could I just need a memory boost?

EDO memory isn't exactly expensive, and if that is all it needs, that is something i can do.

Mike

I don't think it's the amount of RAM, but
you could have faulty hardware of some
sort. Did you try (just to be sure) to install
something old and small :} like an older
Slack on it? If the box can boot of CD,
give Knoppix a shot.

Cheers,
Tink

knoppix will not boot, it needs 32 mb minimum, or is it 64?

dude, go gentoo, or debian, we are running gentoo server on a machine thats p2 266 32 mb ram and debian 3.0 on a p1 100 with 8mb Laptop. with no noticeable slowdowns on either.

its also possible that you just do not have enough memory for the boot image to load into. Also a possibility: you have mis-matched memory modules/dimms, linux is sensitive to that.

Slack is the way to go ;)

Cheers,
Tink

yeah, slack is good, so is vector linux.

hi Brother Michael, have a look there http://www.distrowatch.com/table.php...n=clarkconnect some memory may help indeed, although with less than 64 MB, nowadays you don't get anything graphical (not that useful for your use as a server !).

Hey thanks everyone! I will probably give all the ideas a try, seeing as how it is not my primary computer thus I can fool around with it more.

Ha! Who am I kidding, The computer with Red Hat 9 is my primary computer and I am still fiddling around with it!

Mike