Neil's Open Source & Linux Blog

Gateway Stats From the BIOS (ver. WL81020A.15A0005.P04): Intel Pentium III 800 Mhz, 133 MHz front-side bus. 512 MB RAM - 2 X 256 MB. I think the problem is that this box uses shared video RAM. For more information, see the Red Hat Knowledge Base Article on the i810 chipset .

Restored! The OEM (Gateway) system restoration worked, at least to the point where the computer boots from the HD. I'm going to let it chug away and then I can get all of the driver and hardware info from Windows 98. Yet, strangely, the Restore seems to have hung on the third CD, where many of the drivers are installed.

No Luck at All I booted off of the Partition Magic 8.0 CD and wiped out all of the partitions. Then I tried to use the Red Hat 8.0 CD to install. That dies with a kernel panic. Same with the generic Debian boot. With Debian, the "vanilla" option doesn't work, nor does the default option. When I tried again, with the "bf24" option. I'm not getting anywhere with this. I'm going to restore the original system from the System Restoration Kit (Disc 2) provided by Gateway.

If at First You Don't Succeed... The formatting of the swap partition seems to have hung. (4 hours later) I rebooted. This time, I tried the generic boot: and got this: "Kernel panic. No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel" Reboot. I tried the "compact" option and that doesn't work either - some kind of endless loop. I'm not going to torture myself when I can just go with Red Hat 8.0

Debian 3.0 Install I'm trying to install Debian 3.0 Linux to one of the Gateway Professional computers. From disk 1, I entered "bf24" at the boot: prompt to boot to install using Linux 2.4. I selected English (US) install, En (qwerty) keyboard. Repartitioned the drive: 20 GB Hard disk. Partitioned as follows: 100 MB bootable, 1024 Swap (logical), remainder Linux logical. Initialized the swap partition with a bad-blocks check. This step is either taking an incredibly long time, or the computer has hung.