[PLUG] Disto question

[Auke Kok]

some hints on boot problems -

some old boxes don't like the iso boot sequence with 2.88 emulated floppies (el torito). Most of them prefer an upgraded bios - I've succesfully booted p200 boxes that seemed completely dead at first this way (wouldn't even start loading the kernel e.g.)

always assume your bios is broken first, nobody back in the days knew how to implement acpi properly and the bios tables often are futzed. While windows will load (because it just remaps everything) linux might fail (it actually tries to follow the bios info). So good hints are to disable acpi and apic (boot with noapic noacpi for starters). 

I'm sure there are more tricks but these are the ones that get most of my systems going.

Auke


On Fri, 07 Apr 2006 12:11:25 -0700, Bruce Kilpatrick <bakilpatrick at verizon.net> wrote:
> I downloaded Archie after Ken's suggestions on how to use wget.  Burned
> a CD.  Tried to run live on my old K6II 350.
> I watched it boot, start to load Archie, a few dots across the screen,
> and it reset my machine.  I watched this twice before I stopped the
> process.
> I must need to go back and reread the article on distros and old machines.
> 
> Bruce
> 
> Michael M. wrote:
> 
>> Bruce Kilpatrick wrote:
>>
>>> I went to grab a live CD so I could test drive it and found them
>>> lacking in this offering...shucks!!
>>>
>>
>> See:  http://archie.dotsrc.org/
>>
>> Archie is the liveCD version of Arch Linux, but it's a bit behind the
>> times at the moment.  The latest version was released in November '05.
>> It features an XFCE desktop.
>>
>> Still, it should work.  Arch uses a rolling release system, so in
>> effect the "releases" are just snapshots of the distro at a particular
>> time.  I think just about everybody who uses Arch tracks the CURRENT
>> repositories (and the adventurous also track the TESTING
>> repositories), which means as long as you're installing software then
>> your system is always up-to-date.  That also means that November '05,
>> in Arch Linux terms, is ancient history.  It seems that a lot of the
>> XFCE fans on the Arch message boards are using SVN builds of the next
>> XFCE release, which are already packaged for Arch.  These folks live
>> on the edge. :-)
>>
>> BTW, the hardware detection tool (hwd is the name, I think) that
>> Archie developers built for the live CD is also included in the main
>> distro now and it's excellent.  It created an almost perfect xorg.conf
>> file for me in about half-a-second.  The only thing wrong with it was
>> a missing screen resolution, but that was easily fixed.  It's even
>> better than Debian's 'dpkg-reconfigure xorg', which I thought was
>> already a big improvement over 'xorg -configure'.
>>
>>> Jon Scully wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 4/2/06, Michael M. <nixlists at writemoore.net> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> I'm on day 2 of using Arch Linux ... so far, so good.  I've never
>>>>> seen a
>>>>> computer boot so quickly.  And pacman is slick.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Yes.  This thread http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=20157 was
>>>> a real
>>>> shock.  "Wow, a 17 second boot time *with* X?"
>>>>
>>>> ABS is a real life-saver, too.  What I like most, though, is hardly
>>>> ever
>>>> having to wait for the latest updates.  When OOo publishes a new
>>>> release,
>>>> updates are out in days.  It really helps with security patches, as
>>>> well.
>>>> Good community.
>>>>
>>>> (E-mail me off-line if you have any specific learning-curve
>>>> questions, etc.)
>>>>
>>
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