On Mon, 22 Jul 2002 14:05, Christopher Sawtell wrote: > >Some planning into getting a known good distro for really old machines > >would be good and also one of those boot from CD jobbies too. > > There must be some diagnostic software for ix86 machinery. I know of a > memory tester but not much else. This would save a tremendous amount of > time attempting to install Linux onto dud hardware. Michael spent some 3 > or 4 hours farting about with a recalcitrent machine. From his > descriptions of what was happening I suspect that the machine was > faulty. It's well known that Windows seems to install onto faulty > hardware ok, and then just flakes out intermittently later, but linux is > more demanding. > > I have put the VALinux enhanced RedHat-6.2 onto older machines, but they > did have 32Megs, but I am sure that 16 would be enough, because the > firewalls work well with only 16 megs. s/w - never again will I utter > its full name - installs with only 8 megs, but it swaps continuously. > I have a 1995 vintage Yggdrasil Linux install compact disk which I have > used to install onto a classic Pentium I machine with 16 Megs. > It just happened like it was supposed to. Great pity that distro died, > it was the best at the time. High-power marketing from RH killed it. > > >I tried to install Redhat on young Ben Devine's machine with 16M of RAM > >and Redhat refused to even start. > > Which version of RedHat was that? Try these ones instead:- > > ftp://ftp.valinux.com/pub/software/VALinux/released/6.2.4/os/iso/va-redhat- >os-bin-6.2.4.iso.gz > ftp://ftp.valinux.com/pub/software/VALinux/released/6.2.4/powertools/iso/va >-redhat-powertools-bin-6.2.4.iso.bz2 > > If he put another stick of 8Megs in it would definitely work. Go and see > Molten Media. > > >If we had a distro to install on these kind of machines that can offer > >the most on these sorts of hardware things could have gone a bit > >sweeter. > >
Yes, we have definitely recommended this but for future reference we need to have a distro ready for these sorts of eventualities We need to get some distro junky/connisseurs (like you Chris's and the Nick's and Mahesh etc) and have a good debate and demo a few and suss out the distro that can give the best "bang for buck" on some of those old boxen.
