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trying several linux distros

D

daniel49

Diamond Member
Was just given this machine so am playing with it:

older machine - CPU-Intel celeron 333 mhz- 128 kb l2
primary ide :master hd SeaGate 6 GB
secondary ide :master quantum 6 gb hd-- 40x cd rom slave
Sound:soundblasterlive pci which I added later because it had an old addonics ISA in it.
Onboard Graphics Intel would have to look up which one haven't yet.
pc133 generic ram
standard network card : Linksys 10/100
.
Successes
Anyway so far it has booted successfully 1)ubuntu live cd and 2)was able to install mepis 3.3.1-1 ( kernel 2.4 and 2.6) to primary disk and it runs fine except it did not like that ISA soundcard which i removed.

unsuccessful so far:
knoppix 3.9
ark linux - latest ver
beatrix- latest ver although it seems to go fine till it starts scanning disk partitions and creating /etc/fstab then it just sits there for ever.
mandrake 10.1

So thats a higher then expected failure rate most of them progress a little on install then hang or get kernel panic.
found a trend av in bios which I disabled figuring it may be intefering with install what other settings would you suggest looking for that may be causing problems?
Other ideas?
Or should I just expect this on this age of machine?
Oh by the way all iso md5 sum checked out ok.

thanks for letting me pick your brains.


PS: forgot to mention that I have it on a trendnet kvm switch also.
 
The machine should be fine, I've run Linux on much older machines than that without problems. Personally, I would suspect some sort of hardware problem. Generally the hard disks and memory are the main suspects.
 
It shouldn't panic like that. There is probably a hardware issue. First thing I'd check would be the RAM with memtest86 on a bootable cd or floppy.
 
ok will run memtest on it most of the night from the simply mepis install.
notice the drives are set to LBA mode is that really necessary with a 6 gb drive (thought 8 GB was the barrier) doesn't seem to matter to switch it to normal though?
 
well ran 7 passes of memtest with zero errors so thats not it will continue looking.



edit: Just ran maxtor drive utility and although it gave thumbs up to seagate it says the quantum fireball is dying.

Will pull the drive and see if things act more normally.
 
no pulling that drive out has made zero difference. Now I am beginning to suspect the linux images themselves, in otherwords if the cdrom was trying to read the image off some cheap cd-r medium or perhaps even if the cdrom itself has read problems.
Since knoppix doesn't even need a hard drive.:disgust:
 
Originally posted by: daniel49
no pulling that drive out has made zero difference. Now I am beginning to suspect the linux images themselves, in otherwords if the cdrom was trying to read the image off some cheap cd-r medium or perhaps even if the cdrom itself has read problems.
Since knoppix doesn't even need a hard drive.:disgust:
Click to expand...

I have an IBM intellistation E-Pro PII that will not work with Ubuntu and it's variations no matter what, as a metter of fact Ubuntu failed miserably on all of my Athlon machines including my A64-3000+ with varying graphics cards (Nvidias and ATIs and motherboards. ranging from n-Force to VIA.

And I was getting pretty pissed about linux distros ,but all of that was behind me once I tried Fedora Core , the installation process was easy I was able to pick the apps that I want, and partition my harddrives easily, all of that in a nice and intuitive graphics interface (Anaconda).

Give Fedora Core 4 a shot chances are you will report back with a smiley.
 
sleepwalker: the problem was it worked with 2 of the distros but refused to boot into any of the others for an install on the slave drive.

linuxator: I ran fedora core 3 for quite a while just not crazy about rpm distros i guess🙂


Have solved the problem(s)
slave drive( maxtor was dying) and also the cdrom in machine was having a lot of problem reading my burned disks.

So disconnected bad hd and updated with more modern cdrom and all is smooth sailing looking at ark linux at the moment.
thanks
 
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