Hello,

I've been inactive on the list for several months now. I had somehow gotten
removed from it right around the same time that Cox moved to DHCP.
Anyways...

I'm having a slight problem. Here's a little background:

I've been using Slackware since version 3.4. I have always loved it, but
disliked all of the configuration and non "user-friendly" tasks it sometimes
requires. Don't get me wrong, I like playing around with that kind of stuff
and know what I'm doing, but I always knew it wouldn't be that hard to set
up an install similar to windows that would detect all of your hardware and
configure X for you and all that good stuff. I had heard good things about
Mandrake from this list and other sources, so I downloaded the 3 isos,
burned them and installed them. Worked great! It even detected my audigy
card, which I had had so many problems trying to get to work in Slackware.
It configured X for me, and even did the Cox DHCP thing wonderfully. I was
installed, configured, on the net and completely ready to go in under an
hour. I was very pleased. (oh! it even mounted all of my windows partitions
for me and gave me icons on my desktop for the floppy, DVD Drive, and
Burner!! That was something I had never gotten around to figuring out how to
do in Slackware. I was getting really tired of typing mount commands in a
console window whenever I wanted to use a CD) Needless to say, I think I've
found a new Distro I'm going to stick with for a while.

So, here's my problem:

I have a friend who wants me to set up a firewall for him on his old 486.
It's a Compaq 860 CDS with 16MB RAM, some type of built in video card (I
haven't figured that one out yet cause it's not too big of a deal on a
firewall), one 8 gig hard drive, a burner that I'm using for the CD-ROM (the
original was SCSI coming from a SB16 ISA sound card - took that out real
quick, a floppy, and two ISA NE2000 Compatible network cards (that's another
problem I'm going to need to figure out, getting ISAPNP setup. I can't get
into the bios for anything and it won't boot from the CD so I have to start
with a floppy. The 486 doesn't have a math coprocessor. That part is the
actual problem I'm having.

I created a boot disk with Mandrake that just boots from the CD after
reading the floppy. It reads the floppy, boots the CD, and loads the
graphical selection screen to choose expert install and other options, or
just doing the default install. At that point, no matter which one I choose,
it uses a default kernel from the CD and is stopping right after detecting
the 486 and says that there is no coprocessor detected and math emulation is
not present.

So does anyone know of a way to use the Mandrake CDs to install, but use a
different default kernel than the one that's on the CD? I need to use one
with the math emulation compiled into it.

I don't care how I have to do it, but I want to get Mandrake 8.2 on this
machine. (I'm hoping I haven't overlooked some "hardware requirement" thing
that says Mandrake won't work with less than so much memory or has to have a
certain processor.

Where do I go from here? Did I leave any details out?

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J e f f  B a r k e r
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