No luck on antique laptop

[omer]

I tried installing the alpha on my ancient, now 25 or 26 year old Toshiba Satellite 320CDT -- this is a laptop with a Pentium MMX 233 CPU and 96 MB RAM. Very low spec, obviously. I think Debian 7 or 8 was the last Debian that I was able to successfully install on this machine.

Every boot option produces a screen with just this message after the kernel loads, as OCR'ed by my phone:

[ 12.6901821 Call Trace:
[ 12.690315] dump_stack+0x54/0x68
[ 12.690448] panic+Oxaf/0x254
[ 12.690547] do_exit.cold+0x1e/0xa2
[ 12.690659] do_group_exit+0x2a/0x90
[ 12.690768] [ get_signal+0x131/0x7f0
[ 12.690879] arch_do_signal_or_restart+0x78/0x5b0
[ 12.690977] ? force_sig_fault+0x50/0x70
[ 12.691108] exit_to_user_mode_prepare+0xb9/0x120 
[ 12.691221] ? exc_overflow+0x40/0x40 [
[ 12.691323] irqentry_exit_to_user_mode+0x8/0x20
[ 12.691420] irqentry_exit+0x25/0x30
[ 12.691511] exc_invalid_op+0x4a/0x60
[ 12.691621] handle_exception+0x13d/0x140
[ 12.691707] EIP: 0x80a1d0e
[ 12.691803] Code: f6 74 40 c7 co 08 08 Oe 08 8b 00 c1 e0 05 01 f0 39 f0 76 27
83 3e 07 75 1d 8b 46 14 8b 7e 1c 89 44 24 04 8b 46 10 39 f9 89 fd <0f> 43 e9 8b
76 08 89 44 24 08 eb 21 83 c6 20 eb d5 89 cd 31 ff 31
[ 12.691952] EAX: 00000000 EBX: 080cc000 ECX: 00000010 EDX: 080cc258
[ 12.6920411 ESI: 080480b4 EDI: 00000004 EBP: 00000004 ESP: bf830bd0
[ 12.692133] DS: 007b ES: 007b FS: 0000 GS: 0000 SS: 007b EFLAGS: 00010216 
[ 12.6922631 Kernel Offset: disabled
[ 12.692371] ---[ end Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! exit
code=0x00000004 1---

Is the CPU too old? I ran a memory test and it didn't find any errors in the first pass.

Anyway, thank you for all the work you're putting into DSL!

[John]

Sorry it didn't work. If you just want to play around with the 320CDT you may want to see if you could get the classic 50MB version of DSL running with it.

https://distro.ibiblio.org/damnsmall/release_candidate/

[nortti]

It does seem to be a case of a too old of a cpu: I can reproduce the crash when running under QEMU TCG with the CPU type set to pentium-v1, but not pentium2-v1. The kernel also reports itself as i686 (so pentium pro or later).

You might have better luck with the pmmx version of Adélie Linux.

[omer]

It does seem to be a case of a too old of a cpu: I can reproduce the crash when running under QEMU TCG with the CPU type set to pentium-v1, but not pentium2-v1. The kernel also reports itself as i686 (so pentium pro or later).

You might have better luck with the pmmx version of Adélie Linux.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of Adélie. Another distro I'm thinking of giving a go is AOSC OS/Retro.

Actual i586 machines seem to be rare enough that even software that is supposed to work, usually doesn't. For example, even though the 320CDT exceeds the minimum specifications of Slackware (486/64MB), it won't successfully boot.