Re: 4 Meg memory *Cyrex* machine

[bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens)]

> and when a classmate here asked me to help him 
> installing Debian on his 4 MB Cyrex (sp?) 486-80 I said "sure, no 
i> problem", but the installation didn't complete. When asked to swap disks 
> (boot->root), I prints "Running sh" or something like that, and hangs.

Can you lend your friend a few SIMMS and see if changing the memory
configuration allows the system to install, or if the problem is elsewhere?

The Cyrix processor should work. It can have slightly degraded performance
if the caches aren't enabled (and I think recent kernels fix that), but
it should work.

> o AMI Windows BIOS (no date)

Get in the BIOS set-up and then select "Chipset Setup". The shadow
settings are in there, if they exist.

> 4 MB RAM... actually, at boot up, it counts 38??

There is something I can do to reduce memory usage. The system is starting
two shells (one on the second virtual console), and I can make a boot
command option to make it only start one.

> o Quantum Hardisk using a Quantum driver to translate geometry (yes, the 
> BIOS has LBA support, but the disk doesn't seem to care)

Quantum driver. Is that Ontrack Disk Manager?
Of course this driver won't be used under Linux, but the drive should
work OK.

	Thanks

	Bruce