User Feedback :: How I got DSL running on an OLD Hitachi Laptop
This isn't exactly a how-to guide, but I though I would share my experiences here incase anyone is facing any similar problems with installing and setting up DSL.
I asked a friend for an old Hitachi VisionBook Pro 7340 laptop that they were going to throw out. There was no power adapter and the battery was dead, so another friend managed to get me a suitable power adapter from where he works. The laptop is old, from 1997 I believe, and I was unable to find much information about it online, as it appears that Hitachi no longer makes laptops!
The system specifications are as follows:
Pentium 133Mhz CPU
16MB RAM
2GB Hard Drive
No CD-ROM drive
Floppy Drive
1 USB Port, 2 PCMCIA slots.
Basically I wanted to be able to use the laptop for light web browsing and instant messaging. This would require either a PCMCIA wifi card or a USB wifi adapter for net access, so I searched the web for the cheapest adapter I could find that would work with DSL that I could quickly go and buy from Circuit City. The cheapest one I could find on their site was the Belkin F5D7050 USB Network Adapter, which is compatible with USB 1.0. So, not knowing how to be *positive* if the PCMCIA slots were Type I, II, III or Cardbus, I opted for the Belkin USB Adapter. I searched the web looking to see if there was much success getting the adapter working with ndiswrapper, and it appeared that people were not having much luck. I don't think I found a single case someone getting the adapter working in DSL, but I figured I could always take it back if it didn't work. $39.99 later, I was home again and ready to get started installing DSL.
Since the laptop had no CD-ROM, and the 2GB hard drive already had a FAT32 partition taking up 1.4GB of space with Windows 98 installed, I figured that I would do a "Poorman Install" of DSL (copying parts of the DSL LiveCD to the Windows partition and booting it from a DSL boot floppy). I used a SanDisk Mini Cruzer USB PenDrive to get the needed files from the DSL 3.1 LiveCD image onto the Windows partition, and then created a DSL boot floppy. I booted the laptop from the boot floppy, which in turn found the DSL image on the Windows partition and then loaded DSL. This is where I encountered my first problem; after repartitioning freespace on the drive, the HDD Installer crashed. After restarting again I tried installing from the LiveCD splash screen, which worked, but after this the system crashed during the DSL boot process. Getting tired of this, I tried the same process using a slightly earlier version of DSL (2.4.26), which installed and booted without a single problem. During the install process I opted for multi-user logins and installed LILO to the master boot record, which also worked flawlessly and allows me to dual boot with the existing install of Windows 98 incase I should ever need it (lets hope not!)
For some reason X had decided that the LCD screen supported 1024x768 resolution, a large chunk of the desktop was missing on the bottom and right of the screen. I ran System > Tools > XSetup from the Fluxbox menu and told X to use Xvesa at 800x600 in 16bit. This worked, but the boot process was still in 1024x768 using vesafb, so all the messages tailing the bottom of the screen during boot were not visible. I corrected this by editing /etc/lilo.conf and changing the first line from "vga=791" to "vga=788". After that I ran "sudo lilo" in a terminal to activate the changes, and after rebooting everything was working as it should with the LCD.
At this point the system was a little sluggish, so I got to work getting rid of everything I didn't need to speed things up a bit. I set the Fluxbox style to "Simple", then changed the placement of the Fluxbox toolbar to the top center of the screen and set it to auto-hide. Next I edited /home/dsl/.fluxbox/init and changed the width of the toolbar to 100%. Next I selected Desktop > Icontool from the Fluxbox menu and turned off the desktop icons to free up some more RAM. The last thing I did here was to edit /home/dsl.xinitrc and comment out the lines starting dillo, torsmo (the desktop system monitor), and the combination of fluxter and wmswallow (the mount tool/sound mixer, and the desktop workspace display). After restarting again to make sure my changes worked, the system seemed a lot more responsive!
Next it was time to try and get the USB Wireless adapter working with ndiswrapper! I was pleasantly surprised to find that ndiswrapper was already installed, though when I tried it with the Windows 98 drivers on the CD that came in the box, it did not work. I tried again this time using the 3 files in the Win2K/XP driver directory on the CD, issuing the command "sudo ndiswrapper -i /home/dsl/.wifi-drivers/rt73.inf", which output no errors. The output of "sudo ndiswrapper -l" told me "rt73 driver installed, hardware present", which I had read was a good sign! Running the command "sudo modprobe ndiswrapper" to load the driver output no errors, and I was able to find my home wireless network by running "sudo iwlist wlan0 scan". I connected to my network using the following commands:
sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid AccessPointName
sudo pump -i wlan0
At this point I fired up Dillo and was able to browse to the DSL forums! I had expected a lot more trouble getting the USB wifi adapter working but this was great! :)
I'm going to post the rest of my setup experience in another post on this topic, so there will be more to come shortly for anyone who read this far and is still interested!
vodevil,
I am certainly interested in your experience with this "powerful' hardware running DSL.
A friend of mine has a Dell laptop with 166MHz Pentium MMX with 24 MB of RAM and 1/1.5 GB HD running Windows 98 at the moment. Slow but useable. Painfully. He expressed an interest in running Linux. And the first thing came to my mind was DSL. Unfortunately it would not boot from the CD. I am thinking about booting from a floppy via SmartBoot Manager (I think) with the CD connected via cable.
From what I could see, he had just basic set up with Microsoft Office 2000 obviously for compatability for exchanging documents with other people.
BTW, which wireless device did you get? Is it WPA capable?
I find it very easy to install DSL on old laptops with no cdrom.
This method only needs a bootable floppy drive and a USB port.
A 1.1 USB works fine.
1. Place a DSL pendrive in USB port and DSL usb boot floppy in drive.
2. Boot from floppy and use the install boot option and others as may be needed, e.g., vga=normal, etc. See F2 or F3 for more choices.
3. An installation menu is displayed and select which type of install to hard drive desired option 3, 4, or 5.
Note: If you need to partition the drive, you can select option 0 from the install menu and run fdisk, or cfisk as needed. Then type dslinstall to return to the install menu.
roberts,
Unfortunately, I can not try your method since there is no USB available on this laptop.
I think I'll give the Smart Boot Manager a spin to see where it goes. 
installed recently dsl on a Compaq Armada 1130, P1 120mhz, 48 mb ram, 1 gb hdd with only floppy drive, no cd and no usb.
used the interlink/interserver under msdos 6.2.2 with a parallel link cable to copy dsl iso from my regular computer and used the dsl bootfloppy to get dsl running.
the screen is a DSTN 10.2" supporting 800x600 8bits,
since i found it impossible to properly configure the screen resolution i downloaded xfree86 with mydsl and despite I had some difficulties configuring XFree86, after several tests everything up and running smoothly.
amazing on suchs an old system.
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