Package: (bootdisk) Version: 1996_6_16 APM support is enabled in the 2.0 kernel on this bootdisk. Some "green" motherboards have problems with this, resulting in kernel oops every time during kernel startup (before mounting the root filesystem). Turning off power management in BIOS setup doesn't change anything - the buggy APM BIOS is still there.
The machine has a 486DX2-66 "green" motherboard with Phoenix BIOS (more details on request). Another machine (with Award BIOS) works fine. The 1.2.13 kernel from 0.93R6 boots fine (because it has no APM support). The EIP value from the oops looks rather strange (2045:[<0000d9c5>]), but call trace suggests a problem with APM. The startup messages (may be inaccurate - they had to be written down manually): APM BIOS version 1.0 Flags 0x0b (Driver version 1.2) Entry f000:dbdf cseg16 f000 dseg 40 AC unknown, battery status unknown, battery life unknown Ramdisk ... hda: ST3660A, 520MB ... hdb: WDC AC280M, 81MB ... ... other messages ... FDC 0 is an 8272A. Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address c00004ed current->tss.cr3 = 00101000, %cr3 = 00101000 *pde = 00102067 *pte = 00000027 Oops: 0000 CPU: 0 EIP: 2045:[<0000d9c5>] EFLAGS: 00010012 eax: 00000016 ebx:00173700 ecx:00000000 edx:00000000 esi: 0020b838 edi:00000016 ebp:00007e38 esp:00007e30 ds: 2050 es:0000 fs:0000 gs:0000 ss:0018 Process swapper (pid: 1, process nr: 1, stackpage=00007000) Stack: [snipped, was too much to write down] Call Trace: 001731fe - apm_get_event 00110018 - wake_up_interruptible 00173700 - do_apm_timer 00173579 - get_event 00173645 - check_events 00173700 - do_apm_timer 00173774 - do_apm_timer 00110834 - timer_bh 00115ec7 - do_bottom_half 0010a40b - handle_bottom_half Aiee, killing interrupt handler This problem makes it impossible to install the system on that particular machine. I'd suggest to disable APM support in the default installation kernels - it's not very important to be "green" during installation, users who need APM can recompile the kernel later, and APM code causes some kernel bloat too (RAM is cheap now, but anyway - has anyone tried if it's still possible to install Debian on machines with only 4MB of RAM?). Ideally, it should be possible to enable/disable APM support using boot time parameters. Currently the only way to disable APM is to recompile the kernel, which may be difficult if you don't have a working system first... Marek