Linux

Hi,
Trying to install a small OS to run this old laptop.

Compaq Presario 1685, circa '98
Processor: AMD K6-2 380 MHz Data Bus Speed: 66 MHz
Ram Installed 32 MB moduled
Hard Drive: 4.3 GB
DVD-ROM

Burned in a CD “PUPPY-4.3beta1-k2.6.25.16-v423-SCSI”, tried to boot with it several times BUT all I get is:- “....Large checksome error Boot failed......retry”

Only once booted to a blue screen with a puppy, said waite 5secs, then two lines (forgot the text) with a few dots and nothing more, just hungs for hours.

Can anybody help please? .......nick

PS. I find diiculty in understanding the Puppy Download pages (Download Puppy), which is what to download.
What exactly am I to download for a small OS to go in a CD?.

The ancient CDROM drive in that machine may not be able to properly read modern CDR's. It might even be just plain wearing out.

Get a copy of the wakepup2.img here.
Create a bootable floppy with rawrite2.

If it can't read from it well enough to boot from it, it probably won't work bootstrapping to CD from a boot floppy either. Unless 'wakepup' downloads from the internet instead, which you didn't mention, and would be a bad idea with only 32 megs of RAM.

i have used this method on old systems (386s and 486s) and can tell you it did work for me. obviously not all hardware is the same and chances are that this may cause issues on this particular system. but generally i would say that this does work on older systems where usually the problem is that booting from cd is not supported by the bios (like on somewhat newer systems booting from usb may not be supported whilst booting from cd is supported).

i do not know the minimum system requirements for puppy, but a guess is that he may be better off with something like dsl or deli linux since he's got severely outdated hardware. i've used dsl on an old machine with 500mhz cpu and 192mb ram. only using things like firefox and openoffice, etc. is really slow. however, since this machine has only 32mb of ram it's most likely not possible to use these applications anyway.

Were you having blatant read errors like nichos is, or did your system just not support CDROM booting at all? That his computer showed the puppy logo even once proves it supports cdrom boot!

my apologies for that, rereading what i wrote isn't exactly what i intended to write but somehow did.
i think his machine does not like the bootloader on the cd. bootloaders used for floppy images usually are much lighter on system resources and supported by very old hardware. but maybe he's just got some errors in the image he downloaded.