ok so I got this old core 2 duo machine, you know, a modern x64 intel computer. the Fedora 43 live usb doesn't boot on it, grub says something has a bad sector. but the same live usb works just fine on another computer, and i reimaged the usb drive just in case and it's still misbehaving. I don't think I'm gonna get this working, but I would be interested to know if Fedora dropped backwards compat with non-uefi systems or something like that
what I really want to do is to boot it to a linux new enough to build mollytime so I can then run mollytime and go "ok yes, this is good" or "oh god". I need sdl3 and something in the ballpark of clang 20
@aeva that's the one where you do PIP README.TXT=CON: isn't it
I'm also fantasizing about making my own live USB distro for mollytime, so if anyone knows anything about how to make a custom live linux distro, 🤙
@aeva i know a bit about this. kind of out of it rn but ive done a lot of live image stuff / have friends who have done it different from how i have that i talk to about it
@artemis I'd appreciate some pointers on where to start when you're up for it
@aeva Red Hat has been removing older Intel support in the RHEL 9.6 and later releases. Not sure which Fedora gets forked to RHEL. But RHEL 10.x has cpus less than Skylake removed.
@aeva A good place to start would be “Linux from scratch”. But thats kinda jumping into the deep end. Definitely recommend doing it for your first time in VM. Here’s the website if you are interested. https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
currently my best plan to get mollytime working on that machine is to port mollytime to haiku. I think my meds are starting to wear off for the night
@aeva more likely they dropped support for x86_64v1.
Debian still has v1 support, and CERN has indicated on the mailing list that they'd move away from Debian if they dropped it, so that should work.
@aeva Fedora documentation still mentions booting live media in BIOS mode for a BIOS installation. https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/creating-and-using-a-live-installation-image/
To clarify, is the GRUB menu you see from the USB drive or the internal drive? If it gets to the GRUB menu of the USB drive and fails to boot from that point, I have no idea. If it's not booting GRUB from the USB drive, there might be something in the firmware settings to get it to boot.
@be someone else suggested that fedora might have dropped support for x86_64v1
@aeva That would explain booting the USB drive's GRUB then failing to load the kernel.
@be I'm gonna try debian testing next and see whether it's gonna be debian testing my game or debian testing my patience
@aeva
Just yesterday i installed fedora 43 on a pentium dual core with bios/mbr and worked fine.
@GyrosGeier debian testing live iso just says "os error" or something like that when I tried to boot it
@aeva oh wow.
The next thing I'd try is probably GRML (which has the big advantage that if it doesn't boot, the developers want to fix it).
Might also be that the UEFI interface is not fully compliant, that machine is probably from a time when vendors were still learning.
Debian has a tool called 'live-build' it's used for creating the official live images and can be configured quite easily for creating custom ones.
I once used it to create a prank 'distribution' as a gift for someone who was leaving a job and which did all the things he had been railing about what we shouldn't do in our software for Linux distributions. Took me half a day to do, most of that was writing the script that it would start at boot time.
- replies
- 1
- announces
- 0
- likes
- 1
@aeva it could require a 32bit UEFI boot loader. I have that on an old Mac mini with a Core 2 Duo
@aeva it has instructions all the way to installing steam :3
@pupxel I'll keep that in my back pocket for the next time I feel like I have too much free time 😅
@aeva if you want to take the shorter route and modify an existing distro, everyone should have instructions for that, ubuntu's at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DerivativeDistroHowto
@GyrosGeier do you think a CD installer work or would that be basically the same problem again? is that still a thing?
I should add:
Obviously a part of why it only took half a day was because I didn't care about having a smooth, polished experience. I could have spent a lot more time fine tuning the config.
It served its purpose, which was to get a laugh from the guy, and it was 100% functional from the physical CD which we gave him at the goodbye party, but it was a bit rough around the edges. With a few more days I could have fixed that, but there was no point, obviously.
@aeva You mean boot the live usb?
If you verified that it boots in some other machine with non-uefi legacy bios/mbr then, i don't know, maybe an incompatibility somewhere between bios-usb controller-usb stick on that particular machine.
Try with a different stick, burn the image with a different tool (i used the official fedora mediaWriter) or maybe try ventoy
@aeva the Debian and GRML images at least are polyglots that are also valid ISOs, so that might work.
IIRC ElTorito works by loading a 2.88MB floppy image and booting that, so that might be more reliable than BIOS USB drivers.
@GyrosGeier I just checked, the options are @efi, non-efi, and "auto"
@aeva @GyrosGeier meow??? I don't make computers boot, I just bite em
Ugh. In the early days of Linux, I had to download source code and build the kernel because people weren't yet distributing binaries. That was probably before you were a teenager, or maybe before you were born.
In recent years, I've built Yocto for embedded stuff.
This month, I've been fighting with the LMDE7 live ISO, which gives only a CLI (no GUI beyond GRUB2) when booted on a near-20-year-old machine that boots the LMDE6 GUI in only 640x480 (despite higher-res VESA modes available).
@aeva yes, for sufficiently narrow definitions of "linux"