Booting from floppy (with syslinux), I see the Syslinux banner, then Loading linux.. and it hangs "forever" at that point. (FWIW: There are exactly two periods in the above output.) Using the same floppy on a different (and much more recent) machine, "linux" loads and runs without problem. "linux" is a bzImage file, by the way. The failing machine is an old notebook, Epson Action Note 4000, with an 486SLC processor, 8Mb RAM and no co-processor. This is a 2.4.22 Linux kernel, configured as small as I think is possible. Perhaps the kernel image is still too big, or maybe the code is linked for a non-existent physical address in this tiny machine? Here's the content of syslinux.cfg from the floppy: ------------------------- begin ----------------------- TIMEOUT 50 DEFAULT linux LABEL linux KERNEL linux APPEND root=/dev/ram0 initrd=fs.gz ------------------------- end ------------------------- I'd love to have this machine working with Linux for sitting around the coffee house blog-work. Suggestions sincerely appreciated. -- Ed Skinner, ed at flat5.net, flat5.net
Ed Skinner wrote:> Booting from floppy (with syslinux), I see the Syslinux banner, then > Loading linux.. > and it hangs "forever" at that point. (FWIW: There are exactly two > periods in the above output.) Using the same floppy on a different (and much > more recent) machine, "linux" loads and runs without problem. "linux" is a > bzImage file, by the way. > The failing machine is an old notebook, Epson Action Note 4000, with an > 486SLC processor, 8Mb RAM and no co-processor. This is a 2.4.22 Linux kernel, > configured as small as I think is possible. Perhaps the kernel image is still > too big, or maybe the code is linked for a non-existent physical address in > this tiny machine? > Here's the content of syslinux.cfg from the floppy: > ------------------------- begin ----------------------- > TIMEOUT 50 > DEFAULT linux > LABEL linux > KERNEL linux > APPEND root=/dev/ram0 initrd=fs.gz > ------------------------- end ------------------------- > I'd love to have this machine working with Linux for sitting around the > coffee house blog-work. > Suggestions sincerely appreciated.It probably has a nonstandard A20 gate. This is generally extremely difficult to debug and even harder to find a good solution for. I'm not familiar with the 486SLC and obviously not with the motherboard. -hpa