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I've found the minimum hardware specs for DSL, which is of little help for what I need. Anyone have any idea of the maximum hardware specs DSL can likely handle?

There's no log of supported hardware in DSL. The old forum archive might be the best source of info. I say give it a try yourself and report your success or lack thereof back here.

If the bug does prevent you from booting with GRUB, just use LILO as your bootloader and if the problem still persists, you might need to look at using an IDE HDD or a PCI SATA card.

Also, a SATA DVD drive will quite likely work because DSL uses a different booting system for the CD (err... assuming that system supports SATA drives at all).

Remember to use the "sata" startup command to enable SATA support in DSL.

A bug in the 2.6 kernel might not mean a bug in 2.4. Looking in the bug report that the Wikipedia paragraph is based on, I don't see anyone talking about the bug occurring in anything other than the 2.6.17 kernel.

So there's no indication of whether it's a problem or not, but DSL is mainly aimed at earlier machines than those that use SATA anyway, hence the older kernel with smaller size and better support for older hardware. There is a lot of other new hardware which isn't supported in the 2.4 kernel.

DSL-N with its 2.6 kernel might be affected, but it will probably be replaced by the new DSL that John said he is working on.

Also, DSL comes with LILO as an alternative bootloader and presumably this doesn't suffer the same problem.

Thanks for the info! So will I need to use IDE/EIDE HDD & DVD burner for DSL? Is there any source that lists which "new hardware" isn't supported? I'm doing mostly legacy build, so not too concerned, but would still be useful to know.

The Wikipedia article on JMicron mentioned:

Linux Compatibility

JMicron SATA/IDE controllers are often incompatible with some boot loaders. In particular, those using GRUB, such as Ubuntu, cannot boot in some conditions (2006/08, 2.6.17).[13] The 2.6.18 Linux kernel and JMicron controller BIOS 1.06.53[14] solved these incompatibilities, but may not be present in existing products, or may require re-flashing the motherboard BIOS. Other bootloaders such as the Windows NTLDR boot loader and EXTLINUX work fine. It has been fixed by the latest distros.

As DSL 4.4.10 has kernel 2.4.31, I'm wondering if this will be an issue with motherboard having JMicron JMB362? If so, is there any workaround, patch, etc.? Other than replacing GRUB with EXTLINUX that is (I think that's outside the reach of a newbie!).

Anyone know a download source for Damn Small Linux 3.3?