I'm gonna post this, although I think I've decided to toss this box - I've attempted to boot both DSL 0.9.2 and the latest version of Puppy without success on an old HP Vectra 500 Series Mod 520 PC designed for Win95. As the kernal is loading, it acknowledges the HD and then the cd-rom, but then tosses up an error:

Ooops: 0000
CPU: 0
EIP: 0010:[00000000] Not tainted
EFLAGS: 00010282
eax: 00000000 ebx: 00000003 exc: 00000cf8 eds:00000000
esi:c035963c edi: c035958c ebp: 00000001 esp: c109ff08
Process swapper (pid: 1, stack page: c109f000)
Stack: blah blah blah (appear to be memory locations)
Call trace: additional blah blah blah ...
Code: Bad EIP value
<0> Kernal panic: Attempted to kill init!

The box is a P1-133, 48M ram, 1.2 gig HD. I can find no place to set the latency of the memory, I have tried mem=47000000 and nobiospnp singularily and in combination.

Suggestions most welcome - including the most creative thing to do with this machine, shy of making a paperweight out of it.

hey
did you find out the problem here? I'm getting it now.

Hamish

I never got a reply ... but from what I can tell, there are some earlier bios' that are segmented and Linux can't fully recongize the hardware configuration and other addressing. This error can also occur when the cd rom isn't fully supported.

I never tossed the box ... I might try one more time with a different distro, and from booting off of the floppy drive instead of the cd - that might make a difference. Let me know if you try this.

Thanks,

op.

Is it the pc in your sig? What kind of motherboard are you using?

I was having these problems but they seem to be fixed (at least partially) by changing a few settings in the bios. I'll let you know what those are after I'm finished with gentoo.

DON"T GIVE UP!! Aborting a perfectly good computer is murder.

I'll have to tear into 'em tonight and post the mb manufacture. I am pretty sure it's a pheniox bios ... but could be ami ... I haven't literally tossed 'em out the door yet, but my wife is anxious for me to do something with them and fix'n 'em up with windows isn't in the game plan at the moment. Contemplating hauling them to the flea market and seeing if someone will give $50-75 bucks for 'em with Win95 load on 'em.

Thanks for the reply!

Hey
I have found out, what I believe to be, the reason for all my kernel panics, including this one (probably).

Although my proliant 2500 has 512mb of RAM, linux only recognised 8mb of that! Thus, it constantly ran out of memory. What you can try doing is to append "mem=512M" to your boot command, like in knoppix:
however, each time I did this, I got kernel panic, can't mount VFS. So I couldn't win either way.

What yuo could do is, use a huge amount of your second hard drive (like 4GB) as swap space. I was able to get gentoo to compile some small apps like this. HOwever, it wasn't brilliant.

Hamish