I have a spare machine onto which I am trying to install 2.0 r3. The machine has a Pentium MMX166 processor, two hard drives (one 426Mb with DOS 6.2 and W3.11: the other 1.1Gb empty and available for Linux), 32Mb FPM physical RAM, 1.44 Floppy, 32x CD-ROM Drive, an S3 Virge/DX(PCI) Video Card and an SB compat Sound Card the Monitor is SVGA.
The Motherboard is TX/1 and the BIOS Award which supports CD-ROM booting, both Hard Drives are on the Primary and the CD-ROM is Master on the Secondary. I have little computer experience (although now reasonably knowledgeable with W95), am new to DOS and a complete newbie with Linux - also I'm old. I've turned to Linux for interest and to avoid these persistent 'blue screens' on the main machine. I possess two sets of distributions acquired with Samms introductory book and WGS Encyclopadia and can install RedHat and SuSE, but not Debian which may well be the distribution best suited to me. Both the InfoMagic and Linux Mall discs are of the same version and each gives identical results. Booting direct from the CD-Rom Drive loads Root.bin and Linux, but whatever I do at the boot prompt puts me into a continual rebooting cycle. I've tried all the parameters referred and alluded to in the help files and books. A straight <enter> goes to reboot (after some uncompressing too rapid to read). Adding parameters results in 'can't find kernel'. I've created floppies from files downloaded from ftp.debian (RSC1440.bin, DRV1440.bin, Base-1.bin to Base-5.bin and Root.bin). Booting with RSC1440.bin in the floppy drive puts me into the same automatic rebooting cycle and no parameters work - the 'can't find' message is displayed. I getthe chance to use only one disk. Can anyone, kindly, explain what I'm failing to comprehend or what I'm doing wrong. I would appreciate help (otherwise I may be stuck with Mr Gate's water torture!). Incidentally, to check if some machine fault has developed, I've again booted SuSE from the CD-ROM Drive and I got direct to the installation program. John.
