DSL Tips and Tricks :: Poorman's frugal install -- success.
I have been struggling for 2 days now to make a frugal install to the harddisk of my Toshiba Libretto 100CT, which has no USB ports and cannot boot from a cdrom. I finally got it to work, so I will give the details and hope this will save someone else some time.
The first thing I got to work was the poorman's Live CD install -- I put the dsl bootfloppy.img on a floppy as per the wiki instructions, copied the KNOPPIX directory over to my Windows98 drive C:, and booted from the floppy. Everything worked fine, once I learned to use fb800x600 as a boot parameter.
Then I tried to follow the instructions for a frugal install to my hard drive. I used Partition Magic 8.0 to shrink the windows partition and make an ext2 partition and a swap partition. (I used Partition Magic because I had bought it for other Linux installs. But, as the forum suggests, there are free programs available.)
I rebooted from the floppy into DSL and tried to follow the script for the frugal harddrive install. Since both KNOPPIX and the linux24 kernel were on my hda1 partition, I chose the "File" option and gave the complete path to the linux24 file. THIS WAS WRONG.
(I spent the next 2 days trying to figure out why I got error messages about not being able to mount drives, wrong file system types, files not found, and I forget what else.)
THIS IS WHAT WORKED: Just chose the option "Live CD" even though you have no CD. All messages go away, Grub installs correctly (though it defaults to a non-framebuffer boot that can't work; but it includes the correct one as an option) with both DSL and Windows available. Hurrah!
The only weird thing is that I now have copies of the KNOPPIX directory on both hda1 and hda5. DSL searches for the first copy; if it installs from hda1 it mounts that as /cdrom and it is read-only. If I rename the copy on hda1 then it finds the one on hda5, mounts hda5 as /cdrom, and makes it r-o. So I have to decide which is the more minor nuisance. Probably I'd rather have hda5, my Linux partition, available to write to.
So, thanks to all who wrote documentation on the Wiki and in the forum. And I hope this helps too.
cc
Thanks for sharing your experience.
BTW the [F]ile option is for the intact complete iso file, the dsl-x.iso
why can't you just use that floppy thing to run the live cd then install to hard drive?
I had to boot in text mode to install it on my 13MB NEC 6050MX laptop (yes it's supposed to have 16MB but the #$!@ BIOS copies itself to RAM and refuses to let go. I used the command, hdinstall but DSL 3.01 bags out with an error on hdinstall. I had to make a /randisk/tmp folder to satisfy it. Then it worked like a champ.
You could remonut the partition using:
sudo mount -o remount,rw /cdrom
Just take care you don't then delete the KNOPPIX directory or file it contains.
I see you're using a libretto 100CT. You might want to try the boot option vga=808. This will give you 800x480 for the screen, see:
http://damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Vga%3Dxxx
for more details on this. The sound on these machines needs a bit of tweaking to get working too. See the post:
http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....;t=5491
The current stable & RC versions of DSL won't control the audio properly on the L100CT through the volume control in the dock. You'll need to use DMIX. If you want to control the built-in microphone & external microphone socket separately there will also be problems (they will both be adjusted simultaneously) with the current version of DMIX included with DSL. I have modified versions of a couple of files (docked.lua & DMIX) that resolve this problem for systems like the L100CT. PLease let me know if you would like copies of the files. The modified scripts have casued segmentation faults on some systems, but only if the controls are adjusted frequently. When this happens all that is needed is to restart the program (DMIX or docked.lua).
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