I had installed RH6.0 successfully on a Cyrix MII 300 MHz machine with 128 Mb RAM and 8 Gb HDD, to learn Linux and the various web servers. I could successfully re-install 6.2 and 7.0 versions and use the machine as a file server, ftp server, web server and a mySQL server.

RH8.0 was also installed successfully and the thing seemed to work fine, until I found that a simple operation of a CD copy to hard disk was going wrong. Most of the copied files were corrupted. The copy process seemed to go very fast!

I tried installing RH8.0 on my PII 350 MHz machine, with the same finding. Every application in KDE was installed properly and was working, but a simple (bulk) copy and paste from the CD would go wrong.

I installed RH8.0 on the PIII 866 MHz machine and found that everything was OK. The CDs could be copied and the process would run smoothly and correctly. I have found FC3 and F7 to work well on the PIII machine. In fact, it is for the first time in 8 years that I am USING Linux in a productive way, with OpenOffice and my clipper accounts program - compiled with Harbour.

I tried and procured RH7.3 also, only to find that it has the same problem with Cyrix MII and PII - I could not copy a CD to the Hard disk!

Is it because the distributions after RH7.0 come with 2.4 kernels? I found the copy problem, but do not know if there are other issues involved and would make working susceptible to errors.

Can I install and run Fedora 7 on the MII 300 MHz( RAM increase is ok) without errors?

P.S.

The copy process goes @ 1-1.2 Mb/s (around 600-900 kb/s in general)with the 2.2 kernel and works correctly. However it goes at 3-3.6 Mb/s with the 2.4 version and is stalled many times and results in a corrupted copy. It is the same working with Cyrix MII and Intel PII machines.

The kernel won't matter really, it's more of a driver issue, you need to compile a custom kernel that has your I/O chipset included, what seems to me is happening is the kernel is trying to use the generic support and is failing to do so.

As far as 2.2, 2.4, 2.6 all should work, they have support for your cpu so there would be no issues with that.
Try reinstalling the most current distro and just recompile the kernel, after that everything should be okay.

I had installed the RH8.0 on MII without any error and/or warning. The KDE applications were running smoothly with the 2.4 kernel - I am really confused as to how were they copied to the hard disk, if there was a problem?

Should I install Fedora 7 first and then try to compile a new kernel on the same machine? The idea seems to be daunting and I want to know beforehand, if there are any other issues involved.

Thanks and regards

Well try Fedora 7 first, the thing is Cyrix hasn't been making cpu's for a while now, so I am guessing the default packages will not have support for a chip like that out of the box, I know the kernel supports it, but the question is did redhat include the module out of the box? are there any other kernels you can boot form during the installation process? does FC7 give you an option to choose what kind of kernel you want to install?

I cant help with Fedora, but Debian Sarge has great support and has too mini iso of 8mb.
www.debian.org/distrib/archive
has still always its support.

Sarge can run on a 300 MHz
--
Debian, the reference !

It's not the 300mhz that is the problem, it is the chipset and cpu support
the reason for his post is because every newer installation of a distro keeps corrupting the files it copys, because he knows the hardware works with older version of the distros, it is most likely to be the cause of a kernel module that is not included out of the box.

dont know, maybe backported iso ?
http://kmuto.jp/debian/d-i/
:hu:

Does the installer use different drivers for the chipset? Otherwise the installation itself would be corrupted and probably wouldn't proceed without errors. Can the drivers used by the installer be included in a custom compiled kernel?

I have downloaded sources for 2.6.23 with patch for 2.6.23.12 from the Fedora update site and tried to configure and compile the same on a Pentium D 820+ machine. Linux has matured so much that a newbie like me could configure and compile the kernel without errors in one go (my sincere Thanks are due to the whole community). The only problem seems to be that a lot many modules have been unnecessarily compiled - the /lib/modules are taking up 330Mb as against 45 Mb taken up by the Fedora supplied rpm.

Well if you are feeling adventurous, you could try to elimate them one by one until it's cut down again

Thanks.

I find that about 600Mb disk space has been taken up in my home directory by .ccache directory. Will it grow when I compile another kernel? May I delete the subdirectories under it to free up the space?

How do we uninstall a custom kernel? I think that the copied files to /boot may be deleted with corresponding changes in grub.conf . May I delete the /lib/modules-custom directory also; or some procedure is there for the same?

You can safely remove .ccache from your hone directory
to uninstall a custom kernel you need to just look in grub.conf and look for the current kernel image, once you fine that you can remove any other kernel in /boot has for the modules directory, that should be the same unless the version number of the kernel modules are different, in that case you can remove the older directory containing the modules, if it has the same kernel version it is best that you leave it alone because removing the wrong modules can leave a system unbootible

I googled and found that 'ccache -h' should tell all.

Another interesting finding at kernel.org was that 2.2 was developed till 2004 and 2.4 kernel is still under active development in 2008 (long after the introduction of 2.6 in Dec.2003). Had the machines and/or distributions employing 2.4 been able to use 2.6, there was no need to develop 2.4, any further.

I am unable to gather anything from the Change logs and request a Guru to please make things clear.

Thanks and regards,

As per request, moved to Linux-Software

Thanks, very much.