If you haven't read my State of Linux Distros, read it now. It's the law.
Anyway, you'll see in that post that I was met with kernel panics while installing some distros. IIRC, the panic was always about "init not found" or some similar message. I always assume the problem is with my PC, so I ran diagnostics and found no problems. I added some RAM recently, so I thought that could trigger the problem. So I removed the RAM, and still got the same kernel panic. Just to be extra safe, I downloaded and installed the latest BIOS for my ASUS motherboard. Same problem. I played with various combinations of TPM enabled and disabled, and compatibility modes provided by my BIOS. Same problem. I flashed the thumb drive using four different methods: Ventoy, BalenaEtcher, Rufus, and "dd" (a direct to disk copy utility in Linux). Same problem each time.
SyslinuxOS
I ran into the same problem while trying to install SyslinuxOS. It's a distro packed with everything imaginable for an IT engineer - various network analysis programs (Wireshark, for example), and programs to probe your network infrastructure for vulnerabilities.
To quote from their web site, SyslinuxOS has:
- Mate Desktop
- Gnome Desktop
- Calamares Installer
- kernel 6.5 amd64 for Mate
- kernel 6.5-amd64 for Gnome
- Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, Microsoft Edge, Tor Browser
- Teamviewer, Anydesk, Remmina,, Zoom, Skype
- Wireshark, Packet Tracer 8.2.1, GNS3, Nmap, Lssid, Etherape, Ettercap, PackETH
- Packetsender, Sparrow-Wifi, Angry Ip Scanner, Fast-cli, Speedtest-cli, ipcalc, iperf3
- Munin, Stacer, Zabbix-agent2 Zabbix-fronted
- Suricata, Firetools, Firewalk, Firejails, Cacti
- Icinga, Monit, Nagios4, Fail2ban
- Putty, Cutecom, Gtkterm, Minicom, Terminator
- Isc-dhcp-server, Filezilla, Wine, Balena Etcher, Vlc
- Openvpn, Openconnect, Fortinet SSLVPN, Vpnc, Wireguard
- Virtualbox 7.0 Vmware Player 17
- Firewalld, Gufw, Opensnitch, Shorewall
- Docker, docker-compose, and much more!
So I thought it was a good distro to check out. But I kept getting the same kernel panic. SyslinuxOS is based on Debian, and I can install Debian easily, so something was amiss. Or a mister. It's a mystery to me.
Fortunately for me (but not for them) it doesn't seem to be a popular distro. I say fortunately for me because it's easy to post a comment and get a response. So I posted my problem, and they told me to download the latest Mate version and try again (they have a GNOME and Mate version available, both of which kernel panicked). I did so, and voila, it installed without a hitch.
The Conclusion
So, if you're getting kenel panics when installing any given Linux distro, I recommend that you alert the people who created and maintain that distro. Obviously, it's not likely your PC, but something they can solve in their installation process.
