Coal: Can't get OS to load[solved]

[pottzie]

Trying out Coal on an old Pentium III Thinkpad, the live CD won't go past a line that shows:
[ 2.842744] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LINKC] enabled at IRQ 11

Stops at the same line no matter what version is selected from the live CD.

md5 sum is 65bf7a21059954c010468457b77856e

[pidsley]

What other BBQ spins have you run successfully on this machine?

[machinebacon]

In the boot screen, press [Tab}, then append

acpi=off

and hit enter. Should turn ACPI off. If it doesn't work, try to en-/disable ACPI in BIOS.

[pottzie]

acpi=off made it say:
[ 1.935614] serial 0000 :00 :03.1 : found PCI INT A -> IRQ 11

Made it past that line, then;

[ 1.935777] serial 0000 :00 :03.1 : sharing IRQ 11 with 0000 :00 :03.0

Hangs at that point. Going for bios next and see what happens. I had Trollinger/Openbox on this before, and this box has nada for ram, maybe 256. Crunchbang and Linux BBQ seem to be all that will work on it, unless I want to do an install of Puppy Linux.

Edit: Bios doesn't have much of anything, no acpi lsited. Good old Windows 98.

Edit#2 Just dug out the Trollinger live CD. Hangs at the same line, wonder if this has something to do with the issue I reported after updating a day ago, on another thread where this box wouldn't boot after an update. hard to guess what changed that an update could have affected.

Trying other live CDs and seeing what happens.

[machinebacon]

Oh dear, this sounds quite serious. Is this the Pentium III of those days?
It's possible that the new kernel doesn't rock it anymore. IRQ11, can you check in BIOS again and disable all serial/parallel ports?

[pidsley]

bacon, do we still have an active release with a 486 kernel?

[machinebacon]

As active as we want it to be, Pidsley. There's CLIt for 486, and Oyster, and SpeckDrum.
I just wonder, because OP had Trollinger running on it. I start to think it's more of a hardware issue - OP had a problem after upgrading, though I don't see anything that might have borked an installation.

pottzie, what about memtest? Runs from Live CD, in the menu.

[pottzie]

Got an older Crunchbang to load, it craps out at the same CSI 11 line. I may just have to bite the bullet and say it's just too damn old to work anymore.

[machinebacon]

Try checking the RAM, first (memtest on any live CD, in the boot menu) and then try something like slitaz, porteus, puppy, you know :) I don't think it's the software.

[pottzie]

Wow!! It's fixed.

By voodoo.


Memtest showed nothing. Tried Porteus, it stalled at what looked like the same line, although it was shown differently, x-11 wouldn't start.

Slitaz, for whatever reason, worked. It made it through to the graphics, wouldn't work wirelessly, don't even know if Slitaz has any wireless.

Took it out, rebooted and decided to see what happened with BBQ. Booted (S..L..O..W..L..Y) into Trollinger!

I'm now wondering if I should go ahead and try BBQ LXDE, I know I like LXDE and less is definitely more with this dinosaur, or quit while I'm ahead and just be happy with what I've got.

Typing this from the Pentium III, so it's good.

Edit: LXDE makes it all the way past the login, then goes into loading some other stuff, stops after Wlan0. Looks like it's looking for a network, maybe a wireless issue. I have a usb wireless onboard. Looks like I'm sticking with Trollinger.

[machinebacon]

Or the 32-bit Cameltoe: http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxbb ... o/download
A bit lighter on resources, though not much.

[james c]

Reading this thread a couple of hours ago got me curious so i grabbed an old P3 off the shelf (stable Squeeze and the evil Windows 2000 installed) and am now running Coal live.Booted fast and perfectly usable.Using about 70 mb of ram....... till I launched Iceape.
Super powerful 866 Mhz w/512 Mb of ram.Pretty impressive on this old box.

Code: Select all

bbq@grill:~$ uname -r
3.10-0.towo-siduction-686

bbq@grill:~$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 513136 499824 13312 0 32368 326932
-/+ buffers/cache: 140524 372612
Swap: 0 0 0