I was reading into Debian and might try it first. Maybe some memories will come back, as a child I wasn’t the best at remembering command line. My very first computer was a Texas Instrument running Unix and wrote many of games on that unit. I would sit next to the modem and listen to the computers talk to one another. (The old rotary dial headset modems.)
I remember going to see the very first copier that had “windows” on it and being amazed. The thing looked huge!! (can’t remember what they actually called it.) Then Microsoft came out with windows and the nerds went wild! LoL
Of course as a kid things always seemed grander than they actually was.
Anyway, I’m just stalling and reminiscing. Lets get this show on the road and see just how dumb I really am now days!
I don’t think this hardware is going to allow me to boot from a USB. The bios doesn’t give me a option to force it to boot from USB. (Debian) The bios gives me a boot Sequence, it see’s the USB, let’s try not giving it a number in the boot sequence… ( the struggle is real!!) Dang Dell bios
Keeps giving me “Boot Device Detected, insert system disk and press f1 to continue Press f2 to setup menu”
The bios might be finicky… these old machines don’t come with a UEFI nor do they support booting reading GPT partition tables and booting of a fat32 EFI partition.
Maybe a device needs to be in a specific USB port to be recognized as a boot device.
Try using “Balena Etcher” to make a bootable USB from your chosen distro iso image
… or you can try using ventoy , which is this tool that lets you build a single bootable USB stick which then lets you chainload into whatever ISOs you drop into it.
I have tried all the USB ports.
You have given me plenty to read. I have a feeling this bios is BS (didn’t even think of this being a Dell mobo and having a crappy bios.)
That is the problem f1 (bios) doesn’t allow me to command a boot drive. It gives me the option to change the sequence in which it checks for bootable drives. It sees the USB but won’t boot from USB.
I am going to try going thru dos. Isn’t it something like boot.img pcmia.img
Currently formatting the new SSD with the old Windows Vista, I hope that once the new drive is recognized by the system I can copy Debian onto the new drive since it doesn’t want to boot from a USB.
Also if you have a decent network connection, the “netinstall” image is quite small so it’s easy to fiddle with your method. try a few different drives, small/cheap drives may actually work better for this.
1: Ubuntu Mate.
2: Linux Mint Mate.
3: MX Linux.
4: Linux Lite.
Either of those options are pretty good for a low memory system.
And are pretty easy to configure and get up and running.
Debian for a newbe can be a bit intimidating once installed there is still allot,
of tweaking and configuring etc to do.
MX Linux in that regards would be allot easier to get up and running,
and it’s directly based on Debian stable.
But the other options are also really good.
Just try them out in a vm or live environment to see which one you like best.
Ubuntu Mate is the distribution i can highly recommend.
I think it’s just a matter of having a decently prepared boot USB, using MBR (old school, non-uefi, int13h compatible, CSM, call it whatever). Ventoy can help with that.
Bootloaders like grub and syslinux can provide that for the OS once the OS is installed; ironically, some people use these traditionally Linux only bootloaders to boot latest windows 10 on MBR only machines.
Sadly no, trying to figure out how to use Ventoy. I need to go back to grade school on this stuff. (I remember now, Ventoy was giving me that “always fail” ordeal.)
Oh, I hate the way things start automatically downloading without giving you the option of where you want it to download to. I don’t know if this is a Win 10 thing or what.
Rufus seems to work, I just can’t seem to make a installer. I need to do more reading.
Rufus gives me the option for 5 or 6 of Bootloaders, I just don’t know which one to use and how to use it. I found Wendel’s PFsense video from 5 years ago and watched it a couple of times… I’m unsure of what I’m suppose to do after I have the USB loaded with the bootloader.
Options on Rufus:
Non bootable
FreeDOS
Syslinux 4.07
Syslinux 6.04
ReactOS
Grub 2.06
Grub4DOS 0.4.6a
UEFI:NTFS
My personality wants to know the difference between each one of those.
Update: Figured out why I was having issues with Rufus, I wasn’t running it as Administrator.
This old computer just locks up… It gave me the option to boot from USB but never did anything.