Salix Forums

Update:

salix-fluxbox-14.1 behaves the same on both machines - I can't get past the boot prompt, even with huge.s (returns "aborted.")

On the machine with more memory (actually a 400MHz K6-III; I was mistaken in my original post), salixlive-13.0.1 starts to boot, then immediately I get a blank screen with no further activity.

On the other machine, the 366MHz K6-2 with 230MB memory, I get a little further with salixlive-13.0.1. I get the language selection screen, and then the screen with the "Start Salix Live" option. After that, I get "Booting Salix Live," but immediately afterwards, I get a blank screen with no further activity.

Can you check if there's any setting in the BIOS (maybe about acpi or anything else) that might have something to do with this? I have installed Salix Fluxbox 14.1 with the huge.s kernel in a Pentium 200MMX PC with 384MB RAM, so I know it works with even older hardware than yours.

gapan wrote:Can you check if there's any setting in the BIOS (maybe about acpi or anything else) that might have something to do with this? I have installed Salix Fluxbox 14.1 with the huge.s kernel in a Pentium 200MMX PC with 384MB RAM, so I know it works with even older hardware than yours.

I looked over the BIOS pretty thoroughly in both machines. Nothing like acpi or anything I can recognize relating to boot (except boot drive sequence, of course).

Could the issue possibly be related to the AMD K6 vs. Intel CPUs?

there is a 'tiny' distro for old hardware, Connochaet OS.
Not sure what it is based on but I seem to remember it uses tgz. packages..
And what about Puppy?
They have a variant that is compatible with ubuntu 14.04 packages.

https://connochaetos.org/wiki/

Based on Salix and Slack

I used this on a laptop a few years ago, an old Toshiba Satellite, can't remember specs but pretty low-powered.
I don't know if they have a special kernel now.

Connochaet OS is according to developer compatible with machines back to 486 or 166Mhz Pentium 1 etc.

Think I'll have a look myself - I have a Win 95 era pc somewhere... thought was to run win 3.1 and old games on it but there are emulators for that.

coyotl wrote:Connochaet OS is according to developer compatible with machines back to 486 or 166Mhz Pentium 1 etc.

Thanks; I've dowloaded the iso and will try it out. A couple other distros that I have verified as working on my hardware are Puppy Linux Wary 5.5 and AntiX-M8.5. The most recent distros of either don't. I hadn't mentioned previously on this thread because I wanted to stay focused on why Salix won't boot, and not morph into a discussion of alternatives, but I do very much appreciate the suggestion. (I stated in my original post that Ubuntu 6.06 and 8.04 worked only to demonstrate the hardware isn't broke and to perhaps help diagnose the cause.) BTW, Ubuntu 10.04 and newer don't.

coyotl wrote:Connochaet OS is according to developer compatible with machines back to 486 or 166Mhz Pentium 1 etc.

Just tried to boot Connochaet 14.1, and have exactly the same results as with Salix 14.1 (FLuxbox or Openbox):

I get the "boot:" prompt
Since my machine doesn't support PAE, I try the huge.s kernel. Trying any of "huge.s", huge.s acpi=off", "huge.s acpi=forced" returns: "Loading /kernels/huge.s/bzImage. aborted." And then I'm back to the "boot:" prompt.

OK, I did some searching and this is most probably a bug with the linux kernel. It seems that a change was introduced at some point that broke compatibility with AMD K-6 and went unnoticed for quite a while. I can confirm that the issue reported in that mailing list thread is fixed in kernel 4.4.9, now shipped in slackware-current. So, in theory, that should work with your CPU. I'm not sure when exactly that issue was introduced, or when it was fixed. I know it wasn't fixed in 4.1.4. You could wait for our 14.2beta release, shouldn't be too long now. That will include 4.4.9, or newer.

You can try a slackware-current iso too: http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackw ... rrent-iso/

gapan wrote:OK, I did some searching and this is most probably a bug with the linux kernel. It seems that a change was introduced at some point that broke compatibility with AMD K-6 and went unnoticed for quite a while. I can confirm that the issue reported in that mailing list thread is fixed in kernel 4.4.9, now shipped in slackware-current. So, in theory, that should work with your CPU. I'm not sure when exactly that issue was introduced, or when it was fixed. I know it wasn't fixed in 4.1.4. You could wait for our 14.2beta release, shouldn't be too long now. That will include 4.4.9, or newer.

You can try a slackware-current iso too: http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackw ... rrent-iso/

OK, George, thank you! I'll test the current slackware iso to make sure it works on my machine. I'll report back after I do so.