User Feedback :: Thanks for A Great Distro

I just got DSL up and running on a Toshiba Libretto 70ct. One of the scientists here where I work as a support tech asked me what he could do with it. It originally had Win95 and somehow managed to run Office 2000 with 120MHz (underclocked Pentium MMX 160MHz), 16MB RAM, and a 6" LCD. No CD-ROM but he did provide me with a PCMCIA floppy.
I told him I could install Linux so that it would have a modern OS and modern browsers for surfing the internet. It would be better than Win95! So I set out on my quest. In retrospect it was alot easier than it seemed, but I had alot of trial and error. After reading a few guides on HDD installs without a CDROM I removed the HDD and attached it to an Ubuntu 7.10 machine I use daily and formatted it with a 64MB partition and one large partition for the rest. I copied the KNOPPIX folder contents from the ISO to the small partition and created a boot floppy. Once I put the HDD back in the Libretto and started booting off the floppy I thought I was home free. But alas, I was not.
Segmentation Fault! Around the time of creating the RAMDISK the system would panic, I saw kwapd and cp -r in the errors. I had no idea what to do. I almost gave up and left the Libretto sitting on my desk. During this time I was trying to post to this forum but my account had not been activated. I didn't give up, I just dove deeper into the wiki and there it was under boot option cheat codes: mem=xxM I added that to the boot options and after a few minutes, JWM with a nice Dillo window to greet me.
After that it has been all fun with no real problems. Dillo works great, but Firefox took 5 minutes to load cause it filled up what remained of the 16MB of RAM and started the kernel swapping like a madman. Another hurdle, Dillo didn't display everything correctly, I decided my test for a browser would be logging into my bank and checking my transaction history. Dillo wouldn't work with the javascript crap my bank used. Another week or so went by, then I remembered Opera, it seemed like a relic from the past in my mind, but I went into myDSL, installed Opera and it worked, slowly, but usably for the occasional non-DIllo working websites it would be used for. I replaced Firefox in the tray with an Opera link and not the little Libretto is usable!
I'd like to thank everyone that works on DSL for putting together a distro that, while not made for older hardware, works really well because of the size constraints you have challenged yourself with. My next task is to get a wireless card operating on this notebook to replace the PC card ethernet to cut the final cord and make this thing fully portable.

If you want the system to move better, you could create a swap partition which would definitely help your low memory situation.
(If you don't feel like repartitioning the hdd, you could use a swap file instead.)

Other cheatcodes of that may be of interest: lowram dma

Using DSL with 16mb and Opera - looks like DSL lives up to its name

Oh yes, I forgot to mention a few tweaks. I did HD install on the big partition (~1.4GB) and reformatted the small 64meg partition to swap after the installation was successful. I also configured JWM and disabled 3 of the 4 desktops and also got rid of all the virtual terminals beside 1&2 as suggested in the wiki "reducing memory usage" page.

These are the boot options I'm sending: noacpi nodma noscsi nousb noagp nofirewire frugal mem=16M tz=US/Central
In choosing those, I took the disable everything and enable as necessary frame of mind. Am I actually saving and CPU cycles or memory by nousb, nofirewire, etc or does it not matter because those aren't present on the system anyway? What would be the advantage of enabling dma? Also, I think mem=16M implies lowram or something because the desktop icons are not enabled, but the floating desktop system widget is. I like the desktop widget and lowram gets rid of it...

Hmm.. I'm not sure if it applies to hd-installs, but those nousb, etc. are used to reduce startup time.

DMA for hdd's is used to speed up drive access instead of running in pio mode. In general, enable it unless your drive has problems with it. You could look it up if you want a more in-depth explanation.

If you just want to test it out if it's already running, you could execute

Code Sample

hdparm -d1 /dev/hda

where hda is your hard drive. You'll probably need to run that with root privileges.

It does apply, HD installs use the same init scripts, just skip the initrd.

DMA is definitely worth it, it can speed your HD access up to a factor of 5.

There is an automatic lowram check to disable Dillo on boot, maybe that disables dfm also.

The next thing to do would be to switch to Xchips, to gain faster X startup, lower ram usage, better graphics, friends, success, wealth, and other miraculous things that come with accelerated graphics :;):

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