[Wylug-help] Installing on ancient systems?

[Nick Jeffery]

Anne Wilson wrote:
> Maybe I'm just asking too much, but I wondered whether it would be
> possible to put a user-friendly distro onto a system with a celeron 300
> and 128MB ram.  I thought the best thing to do was to boot knoppix, but
> it simply moved on to the hdd, bypassing the cdrom.  SUSE LiveEval did
> the same.  MEPIS started up OK, but then said

I've recently installed Debain/Unstable on my ancient PII-400 with 192MB of
RAM without problems, booting from a jidgo-made ISO.  Whether or not you
class Debian as "user-friendly" or not, I am unsure.

> Looking for MEPIS Linux....
> Can't startup filesystem
> Halting
>
> Can anyone tell me what is happening?  It does seem extremely strange.

Sounds like it could be a misconfiguration within the BIOS.  Try setting the
CDROM drive in the BIOS config to "CDROM" or "ATAPI" rather than "Auto".  I
had an old P200 motherboard that used to treat my CDROM drive as a hard
drive if it was set to auto -- this might cause problems if your linux
bootup looks to load startup filesystem from /dev/cdrom rather than /dev/hdc
(or whatever).

Also make sure BIOS is set to boot from CDROM then from HDD-0.  You will
probably need to hit Enter at some stage during boot-up to confirm you wish
to boot from the CD.

Hope this helps,
nsj.

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