Guest tompearc Posted January 3, 2005 Report Share Posted January 3, 2005 (edited) I am trying to load mandrake 10.1 onto an old machine which was running win 95, I Fdisked the HD, and I have made a linux floppy boot disk and I have burned the CDs for mandrake 10.1. It boots fine with the floppy, but it doesn't get past the first setup window, it cycles through the install process but it never gets to the screen to select the language or beyond. Is it reading the CD? or it this a Kernel problem? bios problem? It is a 1997 hewlett packer 2gb Hd 64MB of RAM. Newbie. Edited January 4, 2005 by tompearc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted January 3, 2005 Report Share Posted January 3, 2005 Not enough ram You can try text mode but I doubt it'll work. Last requirement I heard was 128MB RAM and that was like....9.2? Then, some people were able to do text mode installs. Now? I doubt it. (me not know about floppies) You can get to text mode by pressing F1 at the splash screen and typing; text you might even consider text ide=nodma maybe you should consider Slackware Debian ooops....that's backwards *cough Maybe you should consider Debian Ubuntu Slackware or something lighter Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted January 3, 2005 Report Share Posted January 3, 2005 ubuntu is not the best choice, as it comes only with gnome2.8, bvc. ubuntu needs at least 128 mb ram. ;) slackware would be a possibility but there are a lot more distros for this specific cases (e.g. vector, damn small linux, featherlinux, ...). just take a look at the huge amount of distros at www.distrowatch.com. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted January 3, 2005 Report Share Posted January 3, 2005 ubuntu needs 128? shame! shame on ubuntu! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChrisM Posted January 3, 2005 Report Share Posted January 3, 2005 ubuntu needs at least 128 mb ram. ;) <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I got hold of one of the free ubuntu CD packs which comes both with a live cd and an install CD. On the pack it says (Intel x86 Edition): ubuntu live cd: You should have at least 128MB of RAM ubuntu install cd: You should have at least 32MB of RAM. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iphitus Posted January 3, 2005 Report Share Posted January 3, 2005 Aye... also, you might not need to use a boot floppy on this computer, I have a HP of similar age that boots from CD. Check bios, the option will be there. As for how much ram is required to run a GNOME desktop (after it's installed), I disagree entirely with all the above.. GNOME will run on 64mb. Thats it, it will run. It won't run awesomely, it wont be rivalling any 2ghz beasts, but it will run. And mind you, it runs faster than windows could. As for mandrake? Go for it, although you will need to use the text based install, as bvc said, just type 'text' and hit enter at the splash screen Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChrisM Posted January 3, 2005 Report Share Posted January 3, 2005 Aye... As for how much ram is required to run a GNOME desktop (after it's installed), I disagree entirely with all the above.. GNOME will run on 64mb. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Yup seems ubunbtu will run as a bare bones on 32MB RAM ubuntu page here But, as iphitus says, for Gnome/ubuntu desktop, you can get away with 64MB RAM ubuntu web page here Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted January 3, 2005 Report Share Posted January 3, 2005 ubuntu needs at least 128 mb ram. ;) <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I got hold of one of the free ubuntu CD packs which comes both with a live cd and an install CD. On the pack it says (Intel x86 Edition): ubuntu live cd: You should have at least 128MB of RAM ubuntu install cd: You should have at least 32MB of RAM. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> shame on me... i thought the 128 mb ram of the live cd also applies to the install cd... :blush: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aRTee Posted January 3, 2005 Report Share Posted January 3, 2005 FWIW, I successfully installed 10.1 OE on an IBM P166MMX with 48MB of RAM and a 4MB graphics card. I actually got to the partitioning in graphical installation before things went haywire - it actually told me I didn't have enough RAM and that I should try the text mode installer instead. Which worked fine. Slow, but fine. The machine took around 5 minutes to boot. It would run icewm (kde I tried once, did run - barely) fine, OOo writer would take around 2.5 mins to start too. As an experiment, this was fine. Would I do it again? No, been there done that, moving on. Without a choice I would go for it though - use all the lightweight stuff, and such a machine can work fine for simple things. Forget about java we stuff, but burning a cd at 8x or so should be fine, using it as a music server too, running icewm - no problem (use rxvt instead of konsole - don't want to have half of kde running all the same). One big thing: with small RAM, put the swap at the beginning of the hd - that's where it's the fastest (hd's read from the outside in, like vinyl, and contrary to cds/dvds, so at the start it's fastest). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tompearc Posted January 4, 2005 Report Share Posted January 4, 2005 (edited) well, I tried the text install with 10.1 and it does the same thing, it just cycles back to the beginning of the start up. I have a feeling the CD ROM is not being read but I will try Ubuntu and see I can any further with that since it may be a RAM problem. Edited January 4, 2005 by tompearc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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