trying to get linux up and running on a frankenstein box. i am newb from head to toe (as far as installing linux goes). what i know of my frankenstein hodge-podge box:

amd k6 processor
24 megs ram
1 - 500 mb hd (fat)
1 - 2 gb hd (fat32)
1 - ide cd-rom (atapi i think)
1 - good old floppy drive

i got the 3 disc images redhat 9.0 downloaded (i am using my other computer to do this stuff: g4 mac with osx, but i am installing on the aforementioned intel machine). i ran the md5checksum and made sure the download was good. i burned the images (succesfully, osx tells me) onto three cdrs. i set my bios to boot from cd-rom. when i put the 1st disc in and power up my system, bios processes, and then it says "booting from cd-rom". it waits a bit and i get this:

ISOLINUX 2.0 2002-10-25 isolinux: Disk error 01, AX = 429B,9F

and that's where it sits until i kill it.


any advice?

thanks in advance.

try making a boot floppy.

run the rawrite program in the dosutils folder to create a bootable floppy using the images\bootdisk.img file (I think its called). you run rawrite from the command line. there is instructions on the CD I think.

Please before you do anymore with ur Linux Red Hat 9 install I want you to know you probably dont have the hardware requirments. YOur biggest hard drive wont even support the room for a typic package install. Just about every component in your system will kill its own self b/c it just wont handle the OS.

It is very possible to do a RedHat 9 install under 1GB, in which case the 2GB drive should do nicely for a root partition & the 500mb HDD for a swap file.

Unless he allready has an OS installed on it, that he wishes to keep.

As well as using a boot disk, it may be necessary to pass a boot option to the kernel, I think some research would be required to find out what this is. But try the boot disk first on its own.

I'd personally condemn that system as being too slow to run X11 anyway, but - check the CD's are good. I've had no end of RedHat CD problems, with 6, 8 and 9 anyway. My 7 CD's worked first time for some weird reason, the others all needed reburning

You'll get Linux and X11 on that system, it just will not run too great....

...Well, what I should say is it will run "after you make your RAM upgrade." Get yourself up to 64MB at least.

X should run tolerably as long as he won't try to run KDE or Gnome. Something light like WindowMaker, IceWm or *box should be quite OK to use.