install hangs immediately on 5400

[Robin Colgrove]

I can see that others have had this problem but cannot find out if 
anyone knows the answer:

5400 with 96M RAM, Sonnet G3 L2 card, standard int HD, no peripherals.

BootX installs OK but when restarting into linux for YDL install, I get 
about a half page of text, then:
arch: exit
then it hangs.

Switching to vmlinux 2.2, making sure that BootX options are set to the 
text ramdisk installer,
restarting again gets to:

"booting..."

then hangs.

Multiple tries. Same things.

thanks for any clues.

robin

[This is one of three machines I have tried and failed to install YDL on 
in the last three days. I will ask about the others in separate letters 
since they all fail in different ways. I have installed linuxppc on 
these machines (years ago) but lateley have only been running MacOS]