Laptops :: booting problems with 486SX



Thanks for that advice!  Using those parameters
(except dsl->knoppix, and I keep pcmcia) including
mem=12M, it boots , though very slowly.

Now the real fun begins!  :)

Actually, I have now tried runlevel 5, and X starts,
but it is so slow that it is unusable.  Maybe I should
try basic linux as suggested by skaos.  But before giving
up, do you think there is any hope of getting X to run
faster under DSL?
To have any chance, the first thing you should to is create a dos swapfile or a linux swap partition.

Then your OS will free up memory by swapping unused code/buffers to the disk drive.

However, it is hard to get by with that small amount of memory.

If at all possible, install more memory.

Although it is a little older, Basic Linux or maybe Deli Linux would be better choices for such a machine, especially if you do not install more RAM.

But give the swapfile or swap partition a try and see if it helps.

It is also a good idea to use the MINIMAL theme/style if you are using X windows. It uses less RAM & CPU, although the default DSL theme back then was pretty minimal too.
Actually I already was using a swap partition, 16M.
Do you think it would help to increase its size?

Looks like I should be able to find a 16MB dram card, so
that will get me up to 20MB. I will try to order it.

As far as getting a minimal desktop, is this something I
can specify at the boot prompt, or will I have to play with this after making DSL bootable from the hard drive (which I
haven't yet figured out how to do)?  The possible desktops
which can be specified at the boot prompt are listed as:
        gnome icewm fluxbox xfce wmaker twm
I prefer fvwm, and am not sure which of the above would be
least demanding.

Incidentally, I get a few other error messages while booting,
no autofs mounts configured
chgrp: failed to get attributes of `/ramdisk/opt': no such file or directory
chgrp: failed to get attributes of `/ramdisk/opt/bashburnrc': no such file or directory
/usr/sbin/xsetup:  failed to get attributes of `/opt/xsetup`
It is a good idea to have a decent amount of total memory (RAM + SWAP = 64MB or larger), but your available hard drive space may be a limiting factor.

DSL 0.5.3.1 only comes with fluxbox, so that is your only choice for a window manager unless you manually install and configure a different one.  Fluxbox is already very efficient and uses little RAM, so you will not see a big improvement with a different one.

You can choose the "minimal" Style from the Fluxbox menu.  There was no boot-time cheatcode to do this back in version 0.5.3.1

The extra RAM will be a big help.

However, you should still refrain from using programs that do a lot of floating point match calculations like MP3 / media players, because they will run very poorly on a 486SX without a math coprocessor.  If you could somehow get and install a 487 math coprocessor, you could then use one of the newer versions of DSL.

original here.