On Tue, 3 Oct 2000, Manuel Bouyer wrote:

> > > Should be possible. fvdl has successfully installed 1.5_ALPHA2 on a 4M machine.
> > 
> > OK. Presumably 1.5_ALPHA2 is a tad bigger than 1.4.2?
> 
> Well, that's not sure. Some work has been done on the kernel to remove some
> features (e.g. NFSv3).

Ah right. Would be interesting to look at the sizes of the images and
compare.

> > Hardware problems are entirely likely, but the machine just rebooting with
> > no message after loading the kernel isn't really a good indication as to
> > where there might be a problem. :-(
> 
> Sure. I guess it panics in the earlier stage of the boot, or, worse, it
> gets a triple fault (in which case it just reboots).

Right. Is there a way to debug this with a bit more certainty? What are
the common causes of an early panic? Presumably a triple-fault would most
likely be caused by a lack of memory?

OK, I just took another look at the machine. It's a 386, not a 486. Should
still work though, right? It's an AMD chip running at 25 MHz, and there's
a separate Cyrix-labelled floating point chip.

With the 2-disc floppy set, it loads the image (completing the line with
the hex numbers), waits for about 2 seconds (decompressing? Or is that
done on the fly?) and then reboots.

-- 
Gillette - the best a man can forget