Laptops :: Problems with a Designote 5500



Hello,

I recently bought a Leo Designote 5500 off of ebay for $10.  I plan on makeing it a Digital picture frame.  This machine has:

-Pentium 166
-16mg Ram
-NeoMagic MagicGraph 128ZV graphics controller
-usb
-12.1 inch screen

I recently got DSL to work on a IBM thinkpad 365x... no cdrom, no usb... huge pain.  So I figured the 5500 wouldnt be that hard... turns out Im wrong.

I am having a little trouble:

-First, it wouldnt boot from the cd.  No biggy, I just used loadlin to get it to run off the HD or the CD

-Second, the video was all messed up.. not a problem either, I just used vga=0x314 (this gives me 800x600 at 16 bit... i think).  That seemed to fix the problem and gave me the nice penguin in the top left corner during boot.

-My last problem... When I boot to X, it pops up with a gray screen with an x in the middle of it.  When I move the mouse the x moves like it is supposed to.  But if I dont move it for about 10 second and try to move it again.. it seems locked.  If I keep trying to move it, it will eventually starts to move (during this time, I can CTL-ALT-Backspace to kill X)  This gets steadily worst untill the cursor x doesnt move at all, and i cant kill x.  But it still is cranking on the cdrom as if it is working.

I decided to just let it sit... and think.   I left for 2 hours and came back and it was booted into Fluxbox or jwm.. I dont know.. but it was frozen.

I have tried different boot labels like lowram and install.  I also tried turning off about every thing using cheatcodes (noideraid nosound noapic noacpi acpi=off noscsi noapm nousb nopcmcia nofirewire nomce)  I cant get it to boot into X and not be frozen.

Is there any way to log what is happening... While it boots so I can maybe figure it out?  or install in a text mode?

Please help..

Thanks
Since you are using loadlin, then I assume you have dos/windows on the hard drive. So...

How about booting up to runlevel 2 like this:

boot:  dsl 2

Then at the prompt type:

mkdosswapfile

Having a swap file should help some.
Also be sure to use dsl v3.1 and if needed boot with the dosswapfile option to be sure the swapfile is being used.

original here.