IBM PS/2-50 Bus Error on install

["Bill Layer" <b.layer@vikingelectronics.com>]

Hey, here is a crappy one..

In preparation for the installfest, I decided to try an install onto an IBM PS/2 model 50 that I had laying about. This machine has a 486-SLC2 CPU @ 66MHz, 8MB of RAM and uses the IBM MCA (Micro Channel Architecture) bus. I was able to boot with the Slackware bare.i bootdisk, and load the color.gz rootdisk. But when I tried to run setup, I just got a stream of Bus Errors.

I looked at the Slackware readme, and discovered that there is a bootdisk called 'ibmmca.i' which supports the MCA bus and many MCA devices such as SCSI controllers and NICs. When I booted with this setup, I was not even able to log in as root; the login screen would just refresh itself every time I tried to log in.. then more Bus Errors.

So my question: Is this machine just not capable of running Linux, or is it damaged in some way? If I recall, I had Win95 running on it without too much trouble...


Bill Layer
Viking Electronics Product Support
b.layer@vikingelectronics.com
http://www.vikingelectronics.com/techsupport