My old Dell went out, temporarily using old pentium II. Every thing works, more or less, but slackware 64 bit won't load nor 13.37 32 bit. Any ideas on what version might work?

Thanks

"Slackware" is a rather big word when something "does not work". To start a system means a number of steps of successfull events:

1. A boot loader
2. A kernel
3. Mounting of a root file system
4. Execution of init scripts

The above applies to a finished installation as well as when booting from installation media.

Which step of the above seems to fail when you say that "slackware won't load"?

regards Henrik

I mean, the youngest possible Pentium II is near 25 years old by now. How confident are you that the capacitors on the motherboard are still good?

For something that old, you'd probably get better results with an older distro. I'd try Slackware 11 on it... and of course leave it disconnected from the Internet.

A Pentium 2 is 32 bit.

How much RAM and disk space? What are you using as a boot device? USB or CD? USB would depend on the BIOS but maybe not.

My guess is a RAM limitation. Slackware 13.1 was the last version that would boot in 64MB of RAM.

I'm not sure why you say "everything works", but then follow up with neither Slackware 32 or 64 booting? 64 definitely won't boot.

In addition to the suggestions above, it could be due to kernel configuration. IIRC you would need a uni-processor kernel where PAE/NX is disabled. I can't remember if this option was available in 13.37 or not.

I did for a time run Slackware 13.37 on an Asus P3-BF system with a slotkit for a Celeron overclocked to 1.2GHz and 512MB RAM off of a Promise IDE accelerator board and 12K rpm drives. That was the venerable 440BX chipset whose usable lifespan I greatly extended, but really I should have spent the time and money at that time on a Super 7 or Pentium III system.

Unless you just enjoy playing around with old gear, too many actually important upgrades were developed during at the very least the first decade of the 21st Century to ignore. Actually it really didn't let up until sometime around 2018. While I still have an nforce 4 board with a flagship AMD FX-57 mounted in a case, I haven't powered it up in well over a year. The oldest PCs I actually still use are Core 2 Duo powered and they are only still actually useful by throwing dollars at it to max out RAM and run SSDs.

These days it's far cheaper to just buy an ARM-based SOC. They aren't fast but they will run circles around just about any system built before 2010.

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Can I ask, what are you using the computer for, or what do you plan to use it for?

Pentium II is so old now that, unless you're specifically interested in playing with retro computers, there's no practical reason or purpose for using one this old, and you'd be lucky to get anything working on it at all honestly.

The age of the hardware also means that it's not unlikely you'll have reliability issues, or it might even conk out completely after a while.

You might be better off getting a Raspberry Pi 2 or 3 and using that, it has modern software support, likely has a lot more memory, is lots faster, and your electricity bill will be smaller.

if I recall correctly back at the time there was no booting over usb. also the few USB was mostly version 1. which means you will either have to boot over CDROM over IDE connection (good luck finding one in working state) or install the OS using a IDE to USB connector over a modern computer. Let's forget floppy disk. They were pretty much dead since 1994.

today I throw to the trash can anything older than a Core2Duo. Our time is a lot more expensive than that.

How much RAM does the unit have? Size of HD?
I suggest you go on ebay and get an old desktop for about $100. That'll run Slackware64-15.0.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/38436942465...Bk9SR9y9pt-qYw

Just for laughs, try booting Slackware 12..

There might be some kernel/compiler/cpu-instruction support issues with 13.37, you could try going after 13.0 or 13.1 but realistically even 13.37 is VERY old at this point and isn't going to host modern packages easily. You really might as well jump to a release from a time where that hardware would still have been in wide-ish use. Even for 12.0, PII kit would have been seen as long in the tooth, cycles were shorter back then.

As other have said though, unless there is a nostalgia or related reason to run such old hardware, in which case old software makes sense along with that, the cylce isn't what it used to be. You can probably dumpster diver a decade old PC, and if you put enough RAM in it for all things not gaming, it would probably be fine. I typing this on an FX-8370 with 32 Gigs of DDR3; and an array 3 Samsung 830 SSDs and this machine is still great is for most things. Its major limitation is the PCIE20.0 bus.. I have got a pair of old Radeon HD6450s, the second for PCI-pass thru and with some hacks like a software "TPM" running, Windows 11 runs fabulously in a VM.

The only this box can't do is run any contemporary games. Yet - I probably couldn't get $100 for it. I think there is just a period of hardware from around 1999-2009 or so that just performs to poorly to be useful for really any application, and also isnt different/unique/interesting enough from what came the decade before or after to be "cool"

I'm using my laptop for work. I just had some old parts and thought why not cobble together a franken pc and see how slackware works on it. If you're old like me, you'll remember this is what got most people interested in linux in the first place.
The machine has one usb drive and the bios only boots off the cd rom. I replaced that with a newer dvd player. Though the harddrive has windows xp professional installed, I want to change to Slackware. I guess it's 32 bit though this is at a time the 64 bit was just coming out.
There is no urgency just asking questions.

beancounterx - I probably am old like you.

Please don't read anything I wrote as disparaging. If you are doing playing with it because you want to see the old stuff run - I think that's great. I and some others here are just trying to make sure we understand the objectives. For a lot of us there is a 'malaise era of PCs' around the period I mentioned give or take a handful of years either way; where things looked a lot like before but a tad bit faster.

I also think there was a period some years ago where say you could make a useful machine with better software and put Slackware on say 233mgz Pentium MMX, and run along side people using Windows on 700mhz parts. The relative costs of things and secondary considerations like power use, made doing stuff like that 'sensible'

Now (at least most places) you can get something just so much better than a 10 year old system for next to nothing, or something that will perform as well without hardly budging the electric meter, its hard to justify bother IMHO; because again a PC with Windows 7 looks a hell of lot like a PC with 2000/XP or one with with 10; The same can be said for Slackware a Slackware 8.1 Desktop looks and feels about like one up thru probably something around 11, and that is more or less like something up thru 13.37. At least as far as something to "play with" and experience the past on goes. So if you are "doing for fun" my suggestion is do it with what works, run Slack 12, if 13.37 won't boot, rather than fight with 13.37.

On the other hand if you had said I want to a PC for some basic web browsing and and light word processing, so I am trying to use 13.37 because I figured that was about the oldest thing I could run a current browswer on - I'd say go run arm-slack15 on a RPi4; your time is worth more than fighting with the old kit.

FWIW there are bootloaders, like PLOP, that will allow booting USB devices on very old machines that don't natively support that feature. There are probably many other ways, but like others here, I no longer mess with PCs older than 64 bit circa 2010. Fourteen years is massive in computing. Just FTR that deal got sealed when a few years ago I bought a working Core 2 Duo Thinkpad for $30.

To answer your question, from my notes, the slackware 13.37 32-bit install disk requires 96 MB of memory to boot. If you get past that, you need 48 MB of memory to boot the installed system. I don't know how much memory you installed winxp with. I do have P2 systems with at least 128 MB. So really I think it's possible to use, and even graphically with FVWM. If you have WinXP on the system, then I think you should be ok with memory, because XP was initially kind of a memory hog. But XP and 64-bit CPUs were actually quite a bit later than the P2 era. You can probably find a way to get something old going.