Linux Install Problems For Newbie

[wilcopshot]

Im well aware that learning linux is an uphill struggle.. But it wont install..I havnt even had the chance to get anything drasticly wrong myself yet. Let alone for my comp to screw up. Im installing mandrake linux from scratch.. No previouse windows. I got my boot disk..It all begins to run. Then it says "please wait, probing serial ports" and then stays like that...for days..months..years...well 2 hours i left it and it whent no-where so i assume its gone wrong..any ideas?

[mairving]

What version of Mandrake are you trying to put on?

What are your system specs?

Why aren't you able to use a bootable CD?

[wilcopshot]

Mandrake 9.0
Iv got a quite old pentium 150Mhz computer. The only things in it are a sound blaster sound card and a pci USB card. I unplugged my radio network USB device in case that was messin it up but it still does nothing. I couldnt get it to boot from CD because the CD rom needs to be installed form start up. I did use windows start up disk at first to install cd rom but i couldnt get the installation to work form then on. That is why i made the mandrake boot up disk and it worked at first but gets stuck probing my serial ports

[OOPS!]

Hi,

Couple of guesses, try a new boot disk, it might be bad. If you are using a d'l ed set of CD's then you might have a bad burn ( did you run the md5sums?). Or possibly, seeing as this is an old machine, you might have a bad serial port. Try to disable them if you can. Just a few wild guesses to maybe look into.

On an a side note, a P150 might not be the best hardware to try out Mandy on. New distro's can be quite demanding (unless you strip a lot of the gui stuff out). I have run Mandy 8.0 on a P200, but you needed a lot of paitence with it. If you must try it and want a gui interface try a lite desktop, say XFce, or Enlightenment.

HTH,
OOPS!

[MaXimum SMOKE]

My personal opinion, this isn't enough machine to run Mandrake 9 in the graphical user interface mode. The problem will be compounded if this is an older style architechture board, that has an upgraded processor to 150, which is very possible. If you are just wanting to learn Linux, or are using a machine that will not be connected directly to the internet , you can use an older version of linux. I would recommend Red Hat, especially if this is not an intel brand processor. I would also recommend like version 6.2 or 7.x versions, so you are not pushing a resource intensive version of XFree86 gui. (Older linux versions have known security issues. I don't recommend running them frontline to the internet, unless the appropriate patches have been applied)

[wilcopshot]

Ok..Cheers. Mandrake i got to work in the end. Just needed a hell of a lot a time. But if it does run too slow i will try the older versions. One quick thing. I would like to learn exactly how it all works. So would you advise a command line or will i get just as much from a GUI????

[TMAN]

GUI is intended to hide all the backends from you. If you want to learn you'll have to get your hands dirty with the command line interface.