Installing linux?

The Time Traveler · External Since: Jan 08, 2006 Posts: 2

I have an old second computer an Athlon 750 with Win98 installed and
running fine. I have tried to install or use a CD version of Linux but
when starts checking the memory it errors and stops. Does anyone know of
a free distro that does not check memory while doing the install? I
don't want to spend any money on this old box. I just want to install
linux to see if I want to move it onto my No.1 machine.
TT

jeff · External Since: Nov 24, 2005 Posts: 10

The Time Traveler wrote:
> I have an old second computer an Athlon 750 with Win98 installed and
> running fine. I have tried to install or use a CD version of Linux but
> when starts checking the memory it errors and stops. Does anyone know
> of a free distro that does not check memory while doing the install? I
> don't want to spend any money on this old box. I just want to install
> linux to see if I want to move it onto my No.1 machine.
> TT
If you have a "live" CD version of Linux, why not just try it directly
on your No.1 machine. Even if you did get the CD to boot on the old
system, it's performance might be so bad that you'd just forget the
whole Linux concept.

Jeff

Bill Marcum · External Since: Jun 14, 2004 Posts: 689

On Sun, 08 Jan 2006 12:47:43 -0600, The Time Traveler
<thetimetravler RemoveThis @yahoo.com> wrote:
> I have an old second computer an Athlon 750 with Win98 installed and
> running fine. I have tried to install or use a CD version of Linux but
> when starts checking the memory it errors and stops. Does anyone know of
> a free distro that does not check memory while doing the install? I
> don't want to spend any money on this old box. I just want to install
> linux to see if I want to move it onto my No.1 machine.
> TT

If the memory is bad, any version of Linux or any other OS will have
problems. Try memtest86 to see if the machine really has bad memory.
If it has more than one SIMM, DIMM or QUIMM installed, you might be able
to find the bad one and remove it.

--
UNIX is hot. It's more than hot. It's steaming. It's quicksilver
lightning with a laserbeam kicker.
-- Michael Jay Tucker

AZ Nomad · External Since: May 26, 2005 Posts: 237

On Sun, 08 Jan 2006 12:47:43 -0600, The Time Traveler <thetimetravler.RemoveThis@yahoo.com> wrote:

>I have an old second computer an Athlon 750 with Win98 installed and
>running fine. I have tried to install or use a CD version of Linux but
>when starts checking the memory it errors and stops. Does anyone know of
>a free distro that does not check memory while doing the install? I
>don't want to spend any money on this old box. I just want to install
>linux to see if I want to move it onto my No.1 machine.

Linux isn't DOS. If you have bad memory, it'll crash sooner or later.
I don't know of any explicit memory check that any distro performs so
I can't help you about disabling such a check.
Perhaps your BIOS is misreporting how much memory you have -- this is
a known BIOS bug.

Some distros let you ask for help on the first screen immediately
after booting from the CD. You might have to boot with a command like
> linux memsize=64m
or something like that. The first param 'linux' is the name of the
kernel, the rest are params passed to the kernel.