After 20years of kicking around my garage i made a poor decision to try to fix this old Compaq Proliant 2500R and press it into service as a mildly crummy linux system to run some CLI games. This beast has a pair of 200mhz 512k Pentium Pro cpus, 1gb of ram, a slot loader cdrom, and now a few larger SCA scsi drives i managed to cram into this. I've been working with a friend to get a flavor of modern linux on it, as it is an early iteration of an i686 system. I've been fighting this system tooth and nail to get this to recognize the memory correctly, as it seems these have some interesting memory management going on inside. It seems the newest thing i've been able to get it to reliably boot has been Slackware 10 x86, as Slackware 15 x86 and Debian 8 through 12 all seem to have problems even booting the installer. I can specify memory manually at the bootloader by appending "mem=1024M@64M" in Slackware 10 (kernel 2.4) to almost get the memory to recognize correctly (it only reports 887MB). Newer kernels I cant seem to get to get anywhere beyond the bootloader. I'm hoping someone can manage to help me figure out what this old Compaq will require from a newer kernel to get things to work.....even partially, as i would really love to put it to use (and give my VT100 terminals some new reasons to live on).