I posted a while ago about problems installing mandrake from floppy (boot problem). No reply, so I'd better ask how to get mandrake on my hard drive, any way you want..

Laptop: 75 MhZ, 775MB HD with Debian installed, 40MB RAM, Floppy, no CDROM
Hard drive is partitioned: 750MB to linux, the remaining to swap and a little DOS partition. (approx)

Debian installed fine, but I want to install Mandrake.

I downloaded the mandrake network.img floppy, but right after I say go and it does Loading network.rdz and Loading vmlinuz, it hangs the computer, even when I used the switches noauto, vgalo, vga16, text, failsafe...

So what can I do? I have a network connection with Debian (I installed Debian itself from the net).

Thanks in advance, PLEASE HELP.

So you have an old Pentium computer.

Unless you specifically downloaded a distribution which supports Pentium machines, the Mandrake releases are for i586's or better.

On an older Pentium machine it will merely hang.

OOPS! Really? I thought i586 was Pentium! doesn't 586 come right after 486, which is right before Pentium?

Anyways if that's the case, is there a Pentium One distribution, or am I stuck to Debian? I like Mandrake's easy graphical setup utilities.

I went to

ftp://mirror.fis.unb.br/pub/linux/Mandrake-old/

as far back as 7.2, but still it said only i586.

I do remember that somewhere on the net I picked up a 'mandrake 2-floppy,' version 6, it was only a shell i think. But it worked.

Also, is there a way to get mandrake's graphical tools on Debian?

I screwed up.

No you are indeed correct.

However there are those that are reporting difficulty with the newest distro versions on the older machines.