Having built some rudimentary familiarity with Linux, I'd like to take another swing at getting Antix on my ancient Sony Vaio PCG-505TR.

I'm trying an install from iso because the CD based install chokes on my PCMCIA based boot cdrom (PCGA-CD5 - reads as a NINJA ATA).

Trying to boot with loadlin from DOS gives me the"panic - CPU too old for this kernel." message.

This VAIO has a Pentium (one) MMX processor. 300MHz.

Are there plans to support this processor, or do I need to look elsewhere, e.g., Slackware.

Thanks in advance.

antiX-M7 Lysistrata uses a 686 kernel so PI, k5/k6 will not boot.
antiX-6.5 Spartacus uses a 586 kernel and k5/k6 does boot. I'm not sure about PI.

In the future I hope to have a kernel that will boot k5/k6, PII, MMX (not sure if a modern kernel will boot PI as well).

antiX is really aimed at those old boxes with PII or above with 128MB RAM and not really old ones. From what I have heard, slackware does a very good job with very old boxes.

I have loaded Spartacus on an olds IBM with P1-166 mmx w/48mb of ram. It worked pretty good and was certainly useable. Boot up with the live disc was slow but tolerable.

eriefisher

Thanks for the suggestions.

I've stayed away from Slackware because of its rep as one of the least friendly distros. I've been playing mostly in the shallow end of the pool, Ubuntu and Mepis and the like.

After reading about the Excito Bubba: its 200 MHz ARM processor and Debian install, I figured, what the hell - if Debian will run on an oversized Newton, it'll run on my Vaio.

After a little bit of wrangling, got Debian 4.0 running on my Sony Vaio PCG-505TR.

I'd already expanded the memory to 128 MHz and changed the 6GB disk for a 60GB one.

Getting Debian installed from the minimal net install was pretty darned easy -- there was no problem with the wacky PCMCIA cdrom boot device, which has vexed a few other distros, including MEPIS.

I did have to hot swap the cdrom's pc card for my Dynex ethernet card back and forth a couple of times, but --- it works. I've abandoned dreams of a snappy desktop machine and have successfully turned a $1500 state of the art slim portable Win98 notebook into a $100 Linux desktop file/print/web server.

Woo Hoo!

Thanks again, guys. I'm sure I'll be back to the Antix/MEPIS side someday.