Mandrake is optimized for Pentium (586) or better processors.  I don't think it
will work on a 486.

Try debian or RH or gentoo or a distro designed for use as a firewall
(smoothwall, esmith, etc...).

> 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?
> 
> --------------------
> J e f f  B a r k e r
> --------------------
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