Thought I'd give some feedback, installed antiX on a dell precision workstation dual pII 400mhz w/ 512 mb ram, an ATI all in wonder 9000, a wireless mouse keyboard combo and an 80gb hdd. Used a plop floppy to boot to usb thanks to a dead CD drive. All hardware in good condition as it was running XP perfectly before. Not sure the cause but booting to live usb was unreliable at best, took a few boots to actually get it to start and run properly without freezing at random points, once it was up it runs pretty decently, then I started the graphical installation however for whatever reason I couldn't click the field to set the domain. Started the cli installer and it worked up to creating accounts, which it froze on. rebooted and the OS is working pretty well, although the only account that it created was the root account before it froze. No freezes otherwise though, not sure why it was acting up during the installer. I created a new account using adduser/passwd commands, but can't login to it due to the error"failed to execute login command", supposedly relates to no home folder being created.

Formatted the system, may try it again later.

When you added your user, did you actually add/give it a home directory (?).
(Your usb may only be v1.0, not even v1.1, which will make it very slow.)
Maybe on your next try, create a swap partition for the installer to use (?).

I wasn't aware I needed to manually create the home directory, my bad then. The system is from 1998 and does have USB 1.1, I've installed debian on this system fine in the past using the same usb stick, maybe the image didn't write correctly. I used rufus to write the ISO image to the flash drive, never been a problem before but doesn't give me the option to make a swap.

YOu shouldn't have to manually make a home directory. You've definitely got something weird going on. I know the alpha1 has some init problems in certain configurations. alpha2 should be along soon, I hear.

I believe there has been some discussions about PII and PIII compatibility with the current alpha1 kernel as well, although if it boots at all for you thats a good sign.

I don't think the domain field works anymore. You should be able to adjust the workgroup though. I would try again with the graphical installer.

Having swap should help on a lower spec machine.

Oh, I do have a swap on the hard drive, just not one on the USB, and yeah it boots pretty flawlessly once installed. All the hardware works out of the box, including audio, so a good sign for P2 desktop motherboard compatibility. I'll give it another go probably tomorrow using the graphical installer. The machine specifically is a dell precision workstation 210m.

swap on the harddrive is what you want anyway, so that's good. the liveUSB should pick it up automatically.

A normal installation creates the home directory & user account, but if you only got a root account, then the home directory likely wasn't created, that was why I asked if you created the user home directory manually when you added a user to the system. Perhaps it was just a flaky install that time. Hope it installs properly for you next time.

So, redid the flash stick and reinstalled, not a single major freeze or crash and the install went pretty smoothly via the graphical installer. I was even able to set the domain just fine this time. Only glitch was I accidentally clicked the button to open the partition manager, and closed it before it finished loading. This caused the installer to stop working and I had to open a new instance of it.

It's on the desktop now and resource usage is showing 4-5% cpu use, 67mb ram, and I think 36mb swap, thing is attached to a 1989 CRT TV at the moment so being hard to read is an understatement, especially with the white on black.

Not sure if someone else has noticed it, but with antiX 2 usb selecting the iso from the recently used portion of the file chooser seems to always either prematurely finish (app says it is done but need to wait till the usb stops flashing before removing) or does not work at all (no iso contents copied). However neither of these problems happen if you choose the file using the regular file path rather than the recently used.

Hi,

I almost used every feasible combination of parameters (incl F7-save) in installing on my old Toshiba Tecra8000 (PII 333Mhz, 192 Mb, Neomagic video, Pcmcia newtork/wifi cards installed, 10 Gig HD). Using plop I could start using a usb stick ( and that has worked great when installing and afterwards using Luddite: the fastest Linux I have seen sofar on my old notebook). I could not start in graphics mode. Sometimes it started (when no kernel panic occured) in non graphics mode. But when trying to install something went wrong with the GRUB installation. As a result there is no way to start my oldie laptop anymore...
But most important: linux on this alfa has big trouble starting...
Keep up the good work I hope this comment helps
Cheers, Wim