I have a Compaq 1500 with 2 166Mhz CPUs, stock CD-ROM, 192MB RAM and a
Smart 2-SL RAID card. I also ripped out the stock Ethernet card (and a
Madge Token Ring adapter) and put in a 3Com 10/100 PCI card (I forget
the exact model but it's nothing special). Finally, the drives are in
a RAID 5 configuration.
The crux of my problem was:
1. I would get an APIC panic and
2. When I didn't get that panic, the install process would hang right
after uncompressing the kernel for booting (this happened for both the
7.2 boot disk and 8.0's bootable CD).
Here's what I did to install Red Hat 7.2 (Enigma):
1. Erase the configuration using Compaq's utility.
2. Did a manual configuration using Compaq's "System Configuration
Utility" (I just accepted the defaults).
3. I configured the RAID array using the Compaq disks and accepted
the defaults.
4. I didn't setup a system partition.
5. Downloaded Red Hat 7.2 ISOs for discs 1 & 2.
6. Created a boot disk from boot.img on CD1.
7. Booted up with the diskette with the CD in the drive.
8. At the install screen, typed: linux text skipddc nopass apm=off
mem=192M nousb noapic expert.
9. Selected a "custom" install.
10. Accepted auto-partition.
11. Selected most packages except X, Gnome and KDE.
12. Worked like a charm.
Since this is to be just a LAMP server (Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP), I
had no need for a GUI so I can't verify if X or other items work.