Re: Debian on Compaq Deskpro 6000 [Summary and Solution]
I'm sorry for starting a thread and then not responding but I got really
busy. I thought I'd post a summary of the advice I got and what I
eventually did to get Debian up and running on this system.
Thanks to the many people who responded to my question both on the list
and privately. Special thanks to Igor Grobman and Peter Galbraith who
offered to provide a custom kernel for me. Luckily I have other Debian
systems so I could compile this myself but I appreciate the offer.
This was the problem. After much whining and pleading I was given the
Compaq to replace a 486 as my Linux system at work. I made a rescue disk
and began the install but part of the way through the boot process, the
machine would spontaneously reboot. I assumed it was because of a bad
probe of some peripheral most likely the network card.
The simplest suggestion was to disable the network card. I tried this but
the problem remained. So it must have been some other device. I tried to
disable as much as possible from the BIOS but I couldn't figure out the
culprit. Carey Evans described a way to stop probing certain memory
addresses which maybe could have worked -- if I knew which were the right
addresses. I tried to guess a couple of ranges based on its DOS
configuration but no dice.
Another suggestion was to compile a custom kernel to replace the one on
the rescue disk. This kernel would only have the exact drivers needed by
my hardware. After some research into exactly what I had (no
documentation :-( ) I did this. Still didn't work. I discovered I also
needed to copy the System.map. Ok try again. Still didn't work. Hmmm
maybe I'd guessed some of the devices wrong? That's when I had an idea.
I found out the Deskpro 6000 can boot directly from CD. So I tried it
and... didn't work. The next time, out of sheer desperation, I tried
typing "linux rescue" at the boot prompt instead of just enter.
Miraculously, this worked! After that it was plain sailing. The only
other hitch is for the Ethernet card to be reliably detected, you have to
do some trickery with a boot floppy and loadlin but this is explained in
the Ethernet HOWTO and is quite straightforward.
-- Jaldhar
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