MEPIS Community Forum

I have tried Mepis 6.0, Mepis 8.0, Mepis 8.5 Canteras (till I realized it doesn't HAVE a DVD drive, just CD & CD-RW drives) Nothing will load. It looked like 6.0 might, but then it hung. Usually I get a black screen with stuff scrolling by so fast I can't read it. I've tried about all the boot options, failsafe, alternate, default, vesa, vesa with the monitor resolution of 1280 x 1024 resolution entered at boot. It will seem fine at first, then the white print starts flying. On a couple of the attempts it stopped and I got pictures of it. Hopefully they will tell something, but I don't understand what they mean. The Dell has about a 30 GB hard drive and 1 GB of RAM (previous owner said he had added some) It seems to be functioning fine with XP, but I don't want Mom using XP, she has been using Mepis 6 the last couple years. I would like to put Mepis 8 on it. I was going to try a USB stick, but it doesn't have an option in BIOS to boot from a USB stick. Tried it anyway, didn't work. I checked the Dell website to see if there was a newer version of the BIOS that might have a boot from USB option. (I have NO idea if that sort of thing would be in an updated bios, but seemed worth a try).The CD drive MAY be an issue, but before I spent the money for a new one I cleaned this one two or three times with a Phillips CD/DVD cleaning disk. I know the Mepis CDs are good, it's what I used to install mine. ANY and ALL help would be appreciated. This would be such a great computer for Mom. The 17" monitor is so much nicer for her than my old laptop she has been using. Ok, here are my snapshots of woe.

The screenshots are of a "kernel oops" and the screen is providing traceback for debugging. Something bad happened with the kernel--and usually it's some kind of driver problem. It might be due to the Intel 845 graphics chipset, and it may be better to disable that in the BIOS if possible and throw in an old discreet video card.

I have one of those in the shop. I looked in the BIOS and there was no place to give the internal video card more memory (@#$%^*!!). I booted into XP and downloaded the newest BIOS and flashed A01 to A02, then went in and set optimal defaults (and changed to boot to CD first as is my preference).

I work w/ Windows all day long so all I have here is a CD of Mepis 8.0.12 32bit that I use for virus removal. It has booted from CD (Yay! hit the space bar to continue and it does) but I don't have time right now to test a Mepis install.

Maybe when I get back...

The Tramp

Add to menu boot line:

agp=off

and see if it will boot

cheers,
ohh

So I got back in the shop and installed 8.0.12 32bit but I had to keep hitting the space bar after passing grub. After booting the hard drive install, I went to menu.1st as root and changed vga=791 to vga=785 and this worked in my case, YMMV. I had to enable the older Broadcom NIC drivers in the Mepis Network Tool.

Mepis seems usable on this PC.

The only changes in this Dell 2350 (that I know of) have been added memory (now 512MB) and the updated BIOS and CMOS set to optimized defaults.

The Tramp

Now, Oranjeboom time.

I had a Dell 4300S, slim line design, that I could only get MEPIS 3 KDE Light to boot on it. I think it was that odd PCI slot card they used in that design. It had two addtional PCI slots that allowed the nic card & video card to sit parrallel to the mother that worked against it. I long ago trashed that system, but dont think I ever got MEPIS on it.

agp=off is a magical command! In fact I am now posting from Mom's Dell with a nice Mepis 8 OS. She is going to love this nice big Acer monitor which M8 picked right up and had the correct resolution on it from the start. I followed what P.T. did and added that agp=off line to my menu.1st and now it will boot fine after install. I got M8 installed, then it wouldn't boot, so typed in the agp=off to boot and then it is fine, so put it in menu.1st. I've added in her Thunderbird, made the icons large for her. I still need to run sgfxi and do a few other things. Will running sgfxi mess with my agp=off?
You are a very wise kind "oldhoghead". Mom & I can't thank you enough. She is used to Mepis, and never remembered to run any of the programs you need to if you are going to use Windows, so I really wanted her to have something she won't have to learn a lot new. Too frustrating for her.
This is awesome, thanks again, so very much!

Congrats on getting Mepis running on your mom's machine savvy

I had to smile as I read the quoted as that ( the other way around ) is always the excuse I hear from people about switching from windows.