jeffdogg

Hi Guys,

I am fairly new to Linux, so please forgive me if this is an easy one....

I have a old Compaq latop that I have been trying to install Linux on for a few weeks now. If anyone has any recommendations on distros, I am willing to try them out. The laptop is an:

Armada 1592 DMT
Pentium Processor
3 GB hard drive
(Not sure of the RAM, although it does reference 49152KB on startup)
It currently has no operating system and I have not been successful in getting into the BIOS to check the settings. Below are the distros I've tried and what has happened...

Mandrake 10.2
Tried to install this version and it froze on the GUI setup. I restarted and tried the text version of the install and it installed successfully, but on boot up I got the error "Kernel Panic: No INIT found. Try passing INIT=option to kernel."

Slackware
Got halfway through the install when I received the same error as above: "Kernel Panic: No INIT found. Try passing INIT=option to kernel."

DSL
I was able to get the live CD to work and run, so I had high hopes for this one. I tried installing this distro, but it stopped installing (I could not read the error because the wording was at the bottom of the laptop screen and the words were cut off.)

Linspire
I could also get the live CD to work on this one. When I tried installing the distro, it froze during the GUI install (I left it on overnight just to make sure.)

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I could do here, or what Distro I should use? I originally was excited about Linux becuase of it's capability to run on relatively older computers. Please don't make me install Windows 98 on it!! Thanks for your help.

Slip

I would not suggest today’s popular user-friendly Linux distributions such as SUSE, Mandrake/Mandrivia, etc.. for a machine with older hardware. Slackware on the other hand should be just fine. The problem that you are having with it sounds like you did not configure, or did not configure correctly, your bootloader.

Are you using LILO or GRUB? Paste the config that you tried using here please.

davebardsley

On my Compaq Armada 1750, PII 366 with 128MB RAM and 6GB HDD I'm running Debian 3.1 via net install; couldn't have been easier to get running.

I'm sure X will run on your machine, but consider using your 'small' (only by comparison) environment for text/command line use most often. I only say that since I only use my Armada for said purpose and my desktop for X.

Dave.

BTW: during the installation process select the most up-to-date stable kernel image (2.6.X i586 or i686 (I'm not 100% positive)) to solve most of your problems.