Grub vs Isolinux on coverdisk

[oldpenguin]

Grub vs Isolinux on coverdisk

Apparently my computer is, ah, er, OLD.
So Grub doesn't work right on my older system.
I tried to get XP, before it went unsupported,
but I ran into difficulties trying to validate the
CD copy I bought at a computer store.

So I decided to try the SuSE in issue 182.
Grub doesn't like my computer either, and there is
no ISOLINUX, or SYSLINUX scripts to play with.

I setup my hard drive with a small DOS partition
so I can syslinux any image I want. (Nice for old
floppy games)... oh yeah, then I made a good sized
swap partition, a good sized ext2 partition (don't
care for Journals) and another EXT2 where I copied
the entire LXF182 DVD to.

To complicate matters I'm using an crt old monitor
which is slightly out of focus. My flatscreen died due
to a cheap capacitor. SO while I wait for my part(s)
I'm getting frustrated straining my eyes, when a simple
script stuck somewhere on the CoverDisk, which would
take so little space, might be helpful to other readers
as well.

Is there a simple way to start a copy of the DVD
in a partition? If nothing else it would run faster.

[nelz]

Grub doesn't like my computer

What does this mean? If anything it should be that your computer does not like GRUB, but that's just being pedantic. What happens when you try to boot the LXFDVDs? How far do you get? What messages do you see?

The reason for switching to GRUB was so we could include the original ISO image on the DVD, becuase some readers want that, but still have it bootable from the DVD. So if you are able to boot from ISO images on your hard disk, just copy the ones you want from the DVD - many of them still use isolinux.

[oldpenguin]

My apologies! The SUSE did start loading, but
I never saw a desktop. The effort placed in
these DVDs is always outstanding.
I meant no offense.

I went after getting some of those boot messages
after reading your message. I discovered my
system started slightly differently each time.
The messages revolved around bad geometry for
the drive (even when no drive was present).
This was the SuSE grub....

I was somewhat dismayed at some of the items being
loaded for a live demo. You are right, my old
system doesn't like much of anything lately. It's
my fussy system. A ran a diagnostic memory test.
That was fine. My old system may not have enough
memory (or horsepower) to please all these things
running at the same time. I'm sure.
I've been trying to load the DVD offline,
but I doubt that would make a difference.
By the way, I didn't notice any minimum system
requirements for any of these distros. Besides
adding large swap areas, there is very little I
can do about the memory - these older systems
have low physical limits.

[nelz]

That's a good point about the system requirements. Where a distro publishes guidelines, we should include them on the DVD.

Swap won't help with a live environment loading, although you could enable it one the distro had loaded. When booting from the original ISO, it is worth checking for any options that reduce memory usage, such as not caching the live filesystem in RAM. Most of the 32 bit distros should load with 256MB, although the performance won't be great.