As I was griping about previously, my skanky old 33MHz 486 firewall box forced me off the air by eating its main disk and I've been having no fun trying to get Linux reinstalled. The general problem is that either Linux doesn't survive the HW probes executed during startup of the various "generic" kernels that come with the various distributions, or else once the kernel actually starts up it can't see one or the other of my NICs (3c509 and SMC8013, both EISA) I started out trying to install Coyote (a Linux Router Project derivative) which really appealed to me because it will load from a floppy and then run "diskless", but after many discouraging failures as described above I was forced to fall back to one of the "normal" disk-based approaches. I tried multiple versions of various distributions like RedHat, Debian and Caldera, but all their generic kernels eventually choked, even though all the distributions offer different kernels configured in different ways in hopes that one of them might not touch any fragile or cantankerous HW in any way that might lead to trouble. The breakthrough came after I began looking at the various distribution booter images and discovered that most of them are now laid out as bootable MSDOS floppies that load the kernel via syslinux. Since I'm currently running the (2.2.17 based) Debian Potato distribution on one of my internal machines, and was lucky enough to have grabbed a local copy of the 2.2.17 kernel sources before I was forced off the air, I built a no-modules Potato kernel custom- configured for the 486 box. Then I mounted (a copy of) the official Potato booter floppy, overwrote its stock "generic" kernel with my own, and was *finally* able to start and run the installation procedure. So, here's hoping something in this tortured tale might help save somebody else's sanity in future. Since Linux is touted as being good for making old HW useful again, it seems likely that I'm not the last person who'll be faced with this sort of trouble. Actually, now that I know I'm not "stuck" with the stock generic booter kernels I might even give Coyote another try, once I'm on the air again and can get hold of the sources to build a kernel of the appropriate version... ********************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the following text in the *body* (*not* the subject line) of the letter: unsubscribe gnhlug **********************************************************
