said Matt Gerginski (on 2001-06-10), > Hi. I want to put debian on a 486 that I recently got from my school. > They were giving away "obsolete" computers, so I grabbed 5 of them. I > just have one small problem: I can't get any of the rescue.bin disks to > boot on the computer. It boots fine in my newer computer, so its not > the disk. To get around that, I used an old slackware bootdisk, and > then loaded the debian root installation disk. It worked great for > everything except for the network configuration and some kernel > modules. I tried to do the neccasary repairs myself, but it seems the > only way to get this thing working right is to use the debian boot > disk. I need to find a boot disk that works, compile a kernel of my own > for the boot disk, or find an older debian boot disk and hope it works > with the machine and still works with the debian installation process. > Any suggestions or help??? Thanks a ton. > > --mattgerg >
how much ram do they have? the lowmem disk is gone from debian 2.2, so you can't install it on a machine with less than 8MB ram. you could install 2.1 and apt-get dist-upgrade to 2.2. i've installed debian 2.2 and dist-upgraded to unstable on a bunch of 486s with >8MB ram with no problems. geordie. -- "The number of Unix installations is now six, with more expected."
