dell laptops and tinycore

[3rail]

I have three dell laptops of different generations (pentium1, pentium3, and pentium4) that refuse to boot with any version of tinycore 2.X ( including 2.8 ).  However, they are all happy booting off of tinycore 1.4.3.  The p1 kernel panics, the p3 and p4 just sit there (no error messages) and never load the window manager (won't drop into text via bootcodes either).  I've tried noacpi, noapci without any luck.

It's not important that they work, I'm mostly just curious to know if anyone else experienced the same kind of issues with dell laptops and tinycore?

TIA

[robc]

I have the same problem with my dell desktop. I've been wanting to revisit it to see if I can get it to work since I haven't tried it since the 2.0rc series.

[OldAdamUser2]

I used to boot a Dell Inspiron 2500 into various Knoppix-based forms of Linux. Unless one passed a bootcode of noscsi, it would always lock up while searching for scsi devices.

Could that be the problem here?

[danielibarnes]

What model of Dell laptop? I have several. I use an older latitude C640 without any problems, and I have an M60 that I use every day.

[3rail]

p4: Inspiron 2650, latest bios, fd5nq11 (hangs on 'Switched to high resolution mode on CPU 0', just found workaround of "acpi=off".  oddly, noacpi boot code didn't help)
p3: Latitude Cpx, latest bios, 6upuc, boots fine with tc 2.8 (guess I got this one confused with the others)
p1: Latitude Cp, latest bios, z0p7y, kernel panics (kernel panic - not syncing, attempted to kill init!)

I forgot about the 'debug' option, that's been useful in pinpointing where tc hangs.

3rail

[curaga]

The 586 panic is a known bug in the 2.x series.

[danielibarnes]

Two out of three isn't bad. I'd wonder if there is a specific kernel config parameter causing the kernel panic. Interesting.

noacpi boot code didn't help

There isn't a "noacpi" boot code. There is a "pci=noacpi" and a "noapic" listed in the Kernel Boot Command-Line Parameter Reference though.

[3rail]

Thanks, good to know guys.

[robc]

I was able to get my dell desktop to run TC 2.8. I had to remaster though. I added libsmbios and its deps and the firmware extensions. I am getting a hang when I try to mount the CD drive though. Besides that everything works great.