Laptops :: DSL on Compaq presario 1200?



Hi!
Has anybody tried to install DSL on Compaq presario 1200?
If so, problems? solutions? .... or did it just run fine?
The machine:
AMD processor
64M RAM
8-10 G HD
Network card.
Should there be a problem?

Many thanks
Marcus
Wow... this must be fate or something... Just last night I was given a compaq presario 1200 to "play with".  The owner had been using it with Windows 98.

I booted it from a CD containing DSL 2.4 with the following boot line:

dsl vga=normal nopcmcia noapic

say NO to the USB MOUSE question
say YES to the PS/2 MOUSE
Pick 1024x768 mode
Pick 24 bit color
Say NO to that next question
and then pick a language

The dang thing boots, and at a nice resolution.

I haven't tried everything but I can tell you the sound works in xmms.  I did the ctrl-L and then tone://1000 test that piccolo recommended and poof there was sound.

I'm not crazy about the touchpad but it works and I'm sure if I plugged in a mouse that would work also.

The other thing that I saw was that the hard drive is divided into a hda1 and hda5. It looks like compaq stashed some restore programs up in hda5. You don't normally see it from the Windows boot but it's there.  

The owner doesn't want me to wipe out Windows yet so I'm forced to run from the Live CD.  The hda5 area had about 150 megs of free space so I booted with the qparted live cd (see www.distrowatch.com and look around for qparted ).. This allowed me to resize the hda5 partition and make it 150 megs smaller. Then I split that 150 megs into an hda6 and hda7. hda6 I made a linux swap file. Hda7 I formatted as extention 2.  

When I rebooted from the live CD it found the swap file and ran a lot smoother. This machine has 64 megs of memory and I recommended to the owner that he not spend any money to upgrade the memory unless he can find it real cheap.  

I can mount the hda7 partition and store things on it that will not bother the windows partition.  I'm using a compex usb wireless lan device that runs on the atmel chipset so I needed to have the atmelusbdrivers.dsl (thanks again tempestuous) to use the device. I put that on hda7 and now when I boot I do:
dsl vga=normal mydsl=hda7 nopcmcia noapic
and it picks up the dsl files on hda7

Somewhere down the line I may do a frugal install. Running off the CD is a little slow but it is usable.

Firefox takes a loooong time to startup so I use dillo for most of the web browsing.

All in all I've been pretty impressed and surprised.

Good luck
I had another chance to muck around with the presario again. I had it booted with DSL 2.4 live cd, using the compex wireless usb device and running off of AC power. I had a terminal open and dillo up and crusing the internet.  About an hour into using the machine it just locked up.  no screen updates, no mouse movement, the ctrl-alt-delete did nothing.  I had to hold the power button down for ten seconds to turn the machine off.

I had booted with:
dsl vga=normal mydsl=hda7 nopcmcia noapic

I'll try it again when I get some time. I also plan to do a little searching on the forum and I may try the current version of DSL and DSL-N

original here.