Hi,
In true geek fashion I went away for a holiday, did some consulting work and
ended up with a project machine. Long story ....
Specs:
Cyrix 486 DX2 66 MHz
8 MB Ram (Single SIMM)
4DVS 2.0 Motherboard, (1 ISA 8 Bit, 3 ISA 16 Bit, 3 VESA) - Unknown
Manufacturer (Tomato?)
Creative Sound Blaster 16 (CT2910, IDE, Panasonic CDROM "IDE like"
connector)
* 1 SAMSUNG HDD
* 1 Creative CDROM CD400T
Trident TVGA-9000i-1 Video (ISA)
ISA Controller Card (COM/Parallel etc ports ...)
* 1 Conner HDD
So I thought I can make Linux work on this puppy, right .... well read more.
I scoured the intenet (www.google.co.nz) looking for a manual for the
motherboard, only to find some scanned pages of part of a mannual, which
contained the right jumper settings for clearing the CMOS (I mean who puts
passwords on BIOS), so no manual just 5 jpg images that are scans of parts
of a manual, I have all the jumper settings for CPUs the memory table
telling me she should take up to 64 MB of RAM.
Distros Attempted:
=> Mandrake, No compiled for i586
=> Redhat 8.0, No
(1) Refuses to start a text mode install on 8 MB of Ram
(2) Kernel Panics while trying to kill the idle process with 24 MB
of RAM (8+8+8, the last two SIMMS are identical the first is different)
(3) Kernel Panics while trying to kill the init process with 16 MB
of RAM (8+8, different SIMMs)
(4) Fails to POST with 16 MB of RAM (8+8 Identical SIMMs)
=> Slackware 8.0 (Cheers Greg@REAP I know you still read this list)
Boots with 8MB, loads the ramdisk image uncompresses the kernel and
fires it up. Finds,
hda: Conner Peripherals 540 MB - CFS 541A, 516 MB w/0kB Cache,
CHS=1048/16/63
hdc: SAMSUNG SHD-30560A (APRO-5) SSI, 535 MB w/128kB Cache, CHS=1087/16/63
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
Note that it sees the HDD on the IDE channel of the Sound Blaster 16 but not
the CDROM or does it (see lines starting with ide)? My problem is
irrespective of which slackware bootdisk image I use (tried sbpcd.i and
bare.i) I cant get the slackware installer started from the CD or cant fdisk
the disks to set up swap, if I use the color.gz rootdisk image off the CD.
While attempting to set up swap partitions in the rudimentary shell I get
given as the installer suggests I do I try to run "#fdisk hda" or "#fdisk
hdc" and all I get returned to me is a varying number of, "Killed" so my
process are getting killed but why? Is it time for memtest86?
All I want this puppy to do is run a kernel with iptables, ssh and samba
through an ISA network card, is this too much to ask? Note I cant try any
other distributions because I only have a 33.6 Kb/s modem availiable and no
CR writer. NFS install is out as I dont have another Linux box only a Win95
one,
Off to the beach tommorow so discuss it among yourselves and I will try the
results next weekend.
Any suggestions ........
Mark Carey
