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[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

I think we have our two DFI motherboards usable for linux now but it took 
some doing.
We have three of them, an older and a newer ITBD Rev A1, and a newer Rev 
B.  The B was working one day and not the next.  The newer A1 would not 
boot linux at all so we started to recycle it (removed from case, took out 
battery and CMOS and jumpers and cpu).  Jim put his backpack on top of it 
for extra measure.

Today we experimented on the B.  Like the A1 it would boot from a 2-floppy 
BL2.  Jim recalled that the hard drive is DR-DOS and the 2-floppy set 
Win98DOS so he tried booting with the 2-floppy set (he remodeled it to 
boot and then ask whether to load linux) and then was able to load BL2 
from the hard drive.  He could also boot from the hard drive with DR-DOS 
and then load zimage from the Win98 boot disk.  If he substituted MS DOS 
6.22 for Win98 DOS linux would not boot.  For some reason, on that 
particular motherboard, linux requires that you either boot with Win98 DOS 
or have zimage on a floppy disk with the Win98 system files.  Strange.

So it looks like we will be putting Win98 DOS on that computer (without 
Win98, meaning defrag after booting with a non-Windows DOS floppy disk).

So we put the jumpers, CMOS, cpu and battery back into the other A1 board
since we thought we could get it to boot linux from Win98 DOS, and now it
boots linux from DR-DOS.  We must have scared it somehow, and also cleaned
off a bit of dust.  Now we need to remove the drives and cards from the
slower computer that we moved them to.  Good practice.

We are leaving out the battery overnight to see if it helps the one that
still is not working.  Removing the battery jumper changed the date but 
not the other CMOS settings.

The first (oldest) A1 works with 1 64M DIMM and 4 8M SIMMs and tells us it 
has 90M RAM.  With 4 16M SIMMS instead it has 98M RAM.

The other A1 and the B (newer) won't boot if you mix DIMM and SIMMs.
These are the ones that also would not boot linux (but now one does) from 
DR-DOS.  

As other people have pointed out, even the same exact model motherboards 
don't act the same, but this is ridiculous!  DFI is a relatively good 
quality motherboard.  Our two DFI VPS boards also don't act the same - one 
could be upgraded to 166MHz (but crashed Windows) and the other could not.