RedHat 8 instalation problems

[Jeffers]

I am crazy, stupid and completely and utterly mad because I thought I would try and install linux on my old p166 computer.

I thought I was lucky because when you looked in the bios it gave you an option to boot from the cd, meaning it must have been on of the first bioses which was able to I think, anyway. It boots from the cd and then asks you to choose either text or graphical installation and neither of them work.

It starts to uncompress the files and then sys ran out of input data, -system halted and goes no further.

So, I decided to try and boot from a floppy disk. The cd I got I found was the publishers edition and therefore did not have the bootable floppy disk files for whatever reason. I then went to the red hat website and downloaded the 8.0 boot disk files and booted my computer. It then quite happily loaded up and got to the stage where it asked me to insert the cd. At this point it then told me that the version on the cd was different, this should not happen, and that it was going to restart my computer, leaving me with my old cmputer and no way of installing redhat.

Anybody have any ideas on how I can install redhat 8 on my old computer, the system specs are below.

p166
32MB Ram
4MB graphics
2GB hard drive

I can't think of anything else to try other then trying to find a nice person to download RedHat 8 for me as I only have 56k.

Please Help.

Jeffers

[dhama]

This may be job for.........STATICON he has installed more OS's than he has had hot dinners...... no wait a minute, I don't think I properly thought that out.....

[staticon]

The fact that the installation starts shows that you are capable of booting from CD but, as it halts, it looks as if you may be trying to load onto a system that is under-spec for this distribution. Most distros these days are optimised for faster machines.
You could try installing an older version of Red Hat - though I am no expert on this distro having failed to install it twice now.
The two distro's I have had most success with are Mandrake and SuSe. You could try one of these but, again, try to get a slightly older version. Any of them should install but some are easier than others. The slowest machine I have ever installed onto successfully was an Intel Pentium 1 200MHzMMX with Mandrake 5, but I have recently had a partial success on an ald Compaq ProLinea with a 486SX - but that was a specialist distro optimised for virtually any old processor.
Best of luck.
I'm sure that, once you get a working Linux box, you will have an enjoyable experience in the open source community. :)

[Jeffers]

Thanx Saticon, perhaps I'll see if I can get away with downloading it at school as I don't fancy downloading it on 56k. :S

We'll wait and see.

Jeffers

[staticon]

Just a thought - it may be worthwhile picking up a copy of Linux Format magazine. They feature distros on the coverdisc most months and some of the distros are supposed to work on older computers. :)

[Jeffers]

Ok Saticon.

I shall look out for the magazine.

Thanx again.

Jeffers

[Dad]

Originally posted by staticon
Just a thought - it may be worthwhile picking up a copy of Linux Format magazine. They feature distros on the coverdisc most months and some of the distros are supposed to work on older computers. :)

I did that once bout three or four years ago and was shocked that it worked. It was so strange to operate compared to windows.
:D

[staticon]

The Linux OS has changed a bit during the last couple of years. The X Window makes operation very Windows like - but with more stability and, best of all, free software. :)

[ragsy]

I've got RedHat 7 installed on a Pentium S 200, it runs fine :D