Re: [TCLUG:17899] IBM PS/2-50 Bus Error on install

[David Wood <jbevren@yahoo.com>]

On Fri, 19 May 2000, Bill Layer wrote:

> 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 never even got that far with bare.i:)

> 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.

Hm.  Nope.. not with that one either.

> 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...

Well, it's MCA, and its a 486.. it _should_ be capable.  The problem is, MCA
support is very young in the linux kernel.  Ask around; I believe there's a
debian install set for MCA's also, but I'm not sure.

-David