On 02-Aug-99 Colin Eddy wrote:
> I am using a 486DX2/66 for this. I have read all the Mandrake and RedHat
> documentation/hardware compatibility lists and they both say that anything
> Intel above a i386 are fully supported. Although on another list, Mandrake
> says all Intel and compatibles, but they only specifically list Pentiums and
> above. Both distributions apparently now give you the option during the
> install process to choose the type of prebuilt kernel you want to install.
> At this point I could see how if I chose a pentium kernel instead of a 486
> one I would have a problem. Since I don't even begin the install before it
> hangs, this should not be the problem. The kernel running from the boot
> disk should be a completely backwards compatible 386 kernel or else they
> should not/could not claim to support the older processors like they do in
> their documentation.
If you read that Mandrake works on anything below a Pentium-class CPU, then it
either wasn't for M6 or it needs to be updated. ALL (or at least most--I don't
know if they compiled Netscape's source code themselves) the Mandrake packages
are compiled with Pentium optimizations, so there wouldn't really be any point
in having a kernel compiled for 386, for Mandrake.
I have no idea why RedHat would give you problems. Maybe there is something
about the newer RedHat/Mandrake installation disks that causes problems
with your hardware. If you're making the boot disks yourself from images, are
you using rawrite in DOS, or dd from an already set up Linux installation? dd
seems more reliable than rawrite. If you don't have an existing Linux
installation, you can make a root/boot disk (there's one on M6 CD and should be
one on RH6 CD too I think), boot from it, and then use dd to make an
installation boot disk.
If THAT doesn't work I'd try starting the installation with a boot disk from an
older version of RedHat.
And if that doesn't work, I'd try either Mandrake 5.3, Redhat 5.2 (if you can
still get them) or another distro..
> As far as other hardware related issues, since I'm already running RedHat
> 5.0 with absolutely no problems, the only issue would be if the newer
> distributions decided to no longer work with my hardware which I haven't
> read anything about anywhere. All my relevant hardware seems to be on the
> lists anyway.
There could be subtle corruptions with your hardware that show up under certain
conditions but not under others. (And it seems a lot of people have had that
kind of trouble with Mandrake in particular.)
-Tom
