Damn Small Linux - Not!

Winter Knight · Joined: 29 May 2006 Posts: 65

I've been using DSL for a while, but I have a wireless card that requires ndiswrapper, and was pleased to discover DSL-n, with a 2.6 kernel. So I downloaded it and tried it out.

I'm using a CTL Daewoo computer that I bought from a school, if that means anything to anybody. It has a:

Pentium II 300 MHz processor
64 MBs of RAM
SVGA PCI video card
15" NEC MultiSync XV15+ SVGA Monitor

After about 10 min or so, the screen blanked and it froze. Pounding on the keyboard had no effect, nor did wildly moving the mouse in a frantic like demeanor. I pressed the Magical Ctrl-Alt-Del, and the picture came back. It said lost connection to X Server. Then Sending Term... Kill...., and continued the shutdown procedure, to where it turned off.

I turned it back on, and booted up again. Btw, I didn't use any cheat codes, either time. When X came up, I did my usual right click and find XVESA Setup Window. XVESA Window was empty! I had never seen that before. I mean, it had an OK button at the top of the window, but no 640x480x16, 800x600,16 blah blah blah. I mean, they were there the first time and worked fine. It is hard to change the resolution to something readable without buttons.

That is my short experience with DSL-n. I'll probably still use it, because of my wireless card. I'll use X some more, and post back here. If I continue to have problems while using X, I'll probably just try use text mode to see if it is any better.

Winter Knight · Joined: 29 May 2006 Posts: 65

I've been using DSL-n for the past few hours, with better results. My wireless card (Linksys USB, WUSB54Gv1) works fine under ndiswrapper. No special tricks, just used ndiswrapper gui, filled in the blanks, and clicked OK. I've been surfing, downloading, just fine. A little slow, but just fine.

With DSL, I would grab my files off of my windows machine with "smbclient" command. When I run that under DSL-n, I get a command not found error. I didn't install the samba extension on DSL, but this command, at least, would still work. I dont understand why it is included with DSL but not with DSL-n. So I've been using a USB thumb drive over my state-of-the-art SNEAKERnet.

Also, Mozilla is kind of slow on a Pentium II. I mean, Firefox isn't exactly super-fast or anything on a P II, but it would be nice if Firefox was included by default instead of Mozilla.

When I load the XVESA applet, sometimes it has buttons, and sometimes it doesn't. There doesn't seem to be any pattern. At least I don't have to reset the machine to try again.

Also, forgot to mention a warning/error I get when I load up. It says something about RDSP and power management. I forgot the exact error. If someone wants the error, ask me. It shows up every boot. Also, PCMCIA and Firewire are detected just fine. Which would be great, but I don't have either installed. No ports or nothing. It doesn't cause problems, but DSL didn't detect my Firewire or PCMCIA, at least not when they weren't installed.

When it froze that one time before, it had been inactive for a period of time. I'm going to try leaving it inactive when I submit this, and see if it freezes again.

Winter Knight · Joined: 29 May 2006 Posts: 65

I left DSL-n inactive for bout an hour. It did not freeze. My total uptime is 4 hrs 30 min. Perhaps that first freeze was just a fluke. Or maybe it was power management turning off the monitor and me being too impatient to let it turn it back on, or something like that.

Keep up the good work.

Peter · Joined: 20 Apr 2006 Posts: 51

It's pretty common to get some errors during startup or false positives when it is trying to configure hardware, I assume that is all part of the automagical hardware configuration. some stuff tells you there was an error, because your hardware doesn't suppost that part, other stuff tells you it succeded just because it didn't burst into flames when it tried to load. But in my experience, it doesn't much matter. For future reference, you can type "dmesg" in a terminal, and get a copy of what the screen said during boot. It is also in a text file of the same name in /var/log, that should be correct, but don't quote me on the location.

Winter Knight · Joined: 29 May 2006 Posts: 65

Yeah. I wasn't worried about the RSDP error or the imaginary hardware findings. I just figured this being a feedback thread, that I should include everything, especially errors and anomolies.

I booted up dsl-n on a newer computer. A Intel Celeron D 2.93 GHz, with 512 MB RAM. This computer has a Asus V9280 Video Card and Same 15" Monitor.

It runs much faster (duh). However, the XVESA applet WILL NOT display any buttons. Ever. At least with my other computer it was a crap shoot with infinity chips. Now, it's more like playing "Guess what number I'm thinking of" with a cheater. Please fix it.

I've been using a workaround. I start with the cheatcode "vga=788", and then when X's configure script loads, I just specify everything it asks for, (mouse port, keyboard, resolution). This is slower and less convenient. If I forget, I have to reboot.

I should mention that this video card (the ASUS V9280, not the other one) has given me problems in two different computers with several OSes. I think it handles some modes fine, and others in a faulty way. However, this XVESA applet problem occurs with two entirely different computers. I think others should give it a try too, even if you like 1024x768.

Peter · Joined: 20 Apr 2006 Posts: 51

The asus card wouldn't happen to be an nvidia-based card, would it? I've had that problem (with xvesa not showing any options) on two systems, and the only thing they had in common was nvidia chipsets.

Winter Knight · Joined: 29 May 2006 Posts: 65

Yes. It is nvidia based.

Winter Knight · Joined: 29 May 2006 Posts: 65

I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere else on this forum, but I find it hard to believe that I am the only one who noticed. xpdf has serious redrawing problems. When you right click on the window, before loading anything, it draws a rectangle with a few options. When you let go, it redraws the window with a different color. It is ugly. xpdf for dsl-n is unable to handle pdf files that xpdf for dsl or my windows pdf reader can handle just fine.

myDSL menu items do not show up on the menu.

"/var" is in "/". It is not a symbolic link to ramdisk. This makes it impossible (without tweaking) to load mydsl extensions such as dsl-dpkg.dsl, which write a lot of files to /var. I have 512 Megs installed, but cannot write any more than 1.x Megs into /var.

roberts · Joined: 17 Apr 2006 Posts: 320 Location: OC CA USA

Thanks for the feedback.

Extensions that are trying to use /var/tmp instead of /tmp need to be corrected.
All versions of Knoppix no longer use /var/tmp. While all past and current versions will support /tmp

Please post your most used extensions and I will correct them.

RE: The RDSP power managment issue might want to try the boot time option of acpi=force to see if that will make it work, otherwise try acpi=off or noacpi or both.

RE: Xvesa showing no buttons with nvidia is not something that I have any control over.

Winter Knight · Joined: 29 May 2006 Posts: 65

Actually, the only extension that I use that I expect to have a menu item is firefox-1.5.0.4.tar.gz. And that is one of mine. I already fixed it. And besides, now I use firefox-1.5.0.4.uci. Menu item works there too.

I'd like to mention that I before I fixed the firefox extension, I had never seen a myDSL menu in DSL-N before. I just assumed that it didn't function. I figured that because I followed the instructions correctly and it worked in DSL but not DSL-n, that it was the fault of DSL-N. Turns out, the instructions that I read were bad (or obsolete).

As for /var being in / and not ramdisk, that is a problem with DSL-N itself. The extension that I was trying to get work is dsl-dpkg.dsl. I can't say that I regularly use it, because it pretty much requires a network, and I can't get my wireless network to work with DSL. And dsl-dpkg.dsl doesn't work with dsl-n. Plus, I've never used apt before. I was just trying it out to see if it was easier than making an extension for every new application I want to use.

Actually, the RSDP error was on a computer that I rarely use. It didn't cause any real problems.

So, I guess just thanks. And keep up the good work.