Good Distrubition for Antique Notebooks?

[heintze]

I would like to to install linux on an old 200MHz notebook that previously hosted Mandrake 7 and Redhat 7.3.

I just tried installing Fedora Core 4 on it and I got a "boot failed: press any key to retry".

Are there other distributions that would be better?

Thanks,
Siegfried

 

[cyoung]

Hpw muach memory does this notebook have? I have FC4 running on an IBM Thinkpad 600e 266mhz PII with 128m of ram, and as long as I don't use KDE or Gnome, it runs ok.

As to the boot failed message, that sounds like a bad CD or bad CD drive to me. Make sure that your CD is good, or try burning another.

 

[heintze]

I believe it has over 256MB ram. I'll burn another one. Is there another way I can test the cd?


Thanks.

 

[cyoung]

You can try the cd in another drive, or if you suspect the cd reader is bad, try a different boot cd.

You may need to go into the laptop's bios and change the settings so that it boots from the CD first.

 

[TrojanWarBlade]

Look at the boot options on the CD (F2 and F3).
From memory I think there is a "mediacheck" option that will (surprisingly) check the media!


Trojan.

 

[xwb]

I found that the newer distributions don't boot on the older PCs. It is something to do with the bootstrap reader.

On some of them it is the size of the disk. The older PCs can only read smaller disks.

Method I which isn't entirely Linux based is to install DOS with MSWGCN. Then suck in the Linux ISO files over the network and then use a diskette boot to install Linux.

 

[TrojanWarBlade]

Linux distros tend to have boot floppy images on the CD for machines that can't boot CDs. So long as you can write the image to floppy you can use that to boot the CD.



Trojan.

 

[BobMCT]

I've had good luck with Xandros for a distro that works with older laptops. They have an "open circulation" version that you can download. Also, regarding your "fail to boot from CD" issue, try booting from the 2nd cd in theseries.

B

 

[heintze]

Thanks for all the support! Here is a status check:

I have a new destkop with a DVD/CD burner which I have successfully burned a Fedora Core 4 DVD and installed on that same machine.

I can boot and install RedHat 7.3 on the notebook. I spent most of saturday trying to get Fedora Core 4 to install on the notebook. I downloaded multiple copies and burned multiple copies thinking I was getting corruption somewhere. I tried DVD and CD.

linux media check fails. I tried installing anyway and sure enough, it fails eventually (before it gets to prompting for the second CD).

Since no link was supplied I might google for Xandros.

Knoppix does not install either. This was burend with a friend's CD.

Here is what I plan to do next:

(1) try running the media check on another computer
(2) try upgrading from Redhat 7.3 to Fedora core 4.

Thanks,
Siegfried

 

[TrojanWarBlade]

If your media fails to pass "media-check" then you're asking for trouble trying to install from it.
You need to get something that checks successfully before trying to install it.


Trojan.