Looking for a little guidance here.
I have a Dell 1950 III server. I wanted to run it with a Linux Server OS. I've tried CentOS, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu. Even a few versions/distros of each (32 and 64 bit). All with no luck. Basically, the installation of the OS goes well, but when the installation media is removed and the server boots up on its own, it freezes up early in the boot process and never recovers. once in a while, it will load an initramfs prompt that doesn't seem to do much.
One day, I decided to compare processing speed of aircrack files between the server and my laptop with Kali on a USB thumb drive. During the experiment, I decided to install Kali on the server and that worked. The server booted on its own. I was using the previous version of Kali, kali-Linux-1.1.0a-amd64(1).iso.
I did an upgrade at one point, that made the system look different. Then did an upgrade and dist-upgrade on 29 Nov 2015, and that killed the server, where it would freeze up again during boot.
There's something with the previous version that allowed the server to work where the current version, and other Linux distro's won't work.
I wanted to see where I should be looking when it comes to solving this issue. I'm thinking it may be something with the kernel processes. Could there be something there that can be modified or disabled that could bypass the hangup to continue booting?
In the meantime, I've reverted back to the non-updated Kali 1.1.0 where I was able to update the repositories to install virtualbox and load another server system (Ubuntu). Could there be another part of the system that I should be looking at? Solving this issue might be able to help me to either upgrade to Kali 2 or install Ubuntu or Debian on the server instead.
