Hi,
I have been impressed with Debian and am installing it on all the systems
on the network here. I have one that's being a little poopy about booting
the installation, and I wonder if anyone has experience with it.
The machine in question is an older DELL 486DX2 50MHz machine, 16MB RAM,
we put a 2.1 GB drive in. It runs Caldera OpenLinux, and will boot a
tomsrtbt floppy just fine.
When I have tried to boot it using a 2.2.12 kernel (from the slink
dist) or a Mandrake 7.0 or a Redhat 5.2 boot disk, the machine gets as far
as the line
'Loading root.bin ...'
and then the display goes blank.
It is a VGA output, using an S3 86C801/86C805 video chip, which I take it
is pretty textbook for old VGA.
I have tried most if not all permutations of playing with shadowing video
RAM in the BIOS, I have tried the boot params 'vga=ask', 'mem=15M', and
maybe a couple of other ones. No matter what, Caldera and tomsrtbt will
boot, but Debian blanks the screen. I thought it was a DPMS compliant
monitor thing, but even with an old VGA monitor that doesn't support it,
it does the same thing.
Can anyone offer a suggestion on how to get Debian talking to this
machine? The kernel does seem to keep loading in the darkness, but I
can't see anything on the screen, so it's not real useful!
Thanks,
Phil Mendelsohn
--
Life is complex:
It has real and imaginary components.
--Unknown
