[SATLUG] booting problems on ISA machine

[Mike]

try these floppy images for RC1 of "The Debian Installer" (thats not
just what it is, thats what its called)
http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/testing/main/installer-i386/rc1/images/floppy/
they will install Debian's "testing" distribution ("Sarge"), and work
much, much better than the now outdated installer for Debian "stable"
("Woody").  Sarge is supposed to be declared stable "real soon now",
and you can pretty much already rely on it for production use in all
but the most critical deployments.

good luck,
 - mike



--- Travis <solinym at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hey I've got a strange thing.
> 
> The BSDs seem to not like my SCSI CD-ROMs any more so
> I decided to try using them in a Linux box.  I have a
> 486 and stocked it all SCSI - both HDD and CD-ROM. 
> Unforunately it only has ISA and VLB slots, so the
> controller is an AHA-1542B, old but a standard at one
> time.
> 
> I was going to install FC2 but it requires booting off
> of a CD-ROM, and I don't think I can do that on any of
> my SCSI controllers, much less the ancient AHA-1542B. 
> So I went to debian and tried to boot off a floppy. 
> Their stable-distro "rescue" floppy reports it uses a
> 2.2 kernel by the way - what's up with that?  Anyway,
> it hangs right after the md driver probe, and
> comparing that to other boots suggests its the SCSI
> card probing that's hanging.
> 
> 1) Do people have suggestions for distros other than
> Debian?  I'm lazy with regard to this particular box
> and want something that's easy to get running and
> upgrade and won't require recompiling for days because
> I really don't care that much about performance.
> 
> 2) Do I need to provide some kind of args at the boot:
> prompt for the aha-1542B?
> 
> 3) I recall ISA DMA cards having a problem with memory
> over 16MB, which was solved in BSDs by using something
> called "bounce buffers".  This machine has 64MB
> currently - is this a problem?  Is it possible that
> this kind of work-around for old hardware has been
> removed from Linux?  I doubt it since the boot disk is
> 2.2 but it doesn't hurt to ask.
> 
> Any other comments?
> 
> Thanks,
> T
> 
> 
> 		
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