Laptops :: DSL Kernel Panic & Failed Boot on P133/16mb Ram

Hi,

I'm the proud owner of a Tosbiha Satellite 440 CDX Laptop, it's a Pentium 1 - 133mhz with 16mb RAM and a 1.3GB harddisk.

I purchased a new v3.2 DSL cd and it works fine via Qemu on my Win2k box, however when I tried booting from cd on the laptop the following happens:

http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b117/ejecta/panic.jpg

I've tried failsale, vga=normal, etc and nothing seems to change the failed boot, although in failsafe the error does seem to occurr later, but normally its when it's "setting paths" I think (text scrolls up rather fast). It does appear to detect all the devices fine though (only have Cdrom/HD plugged in).

So erm... help?

I should add I'm quite the linux "n00b" coming from a microsoft career from Dos 3.1 onwards.

Either your memory is faulty or you have too little of it.
Do you have a swap?
Have you tried the extra-low-ram mode (from the wiki)?

From forum search:
Try booting with "mem=16M"

If its an error on pcmcia, try "nopcmcia"

Of course, if you don't have a swap set up yet, you can combine the lowram, etc. parameters with these.

The memory definitely isn't faulty as prior the machine runs Win98SE "fine" albeit a little sluggish.

I've no idea how to do/make the swap you've mentioned... although I will have more of a fiddle around tonight.

Good news though! using "dsl mem=16m" it fully boots and starts X however it's morning at the moment so the little ones thought the laptop was the best toy ever so after carefully guarding it for 10 minutes and it still trying to load X I gave up... will sit down tonight with it and see what I can do as I'd really prefer to be using linux than 98.

Assuming you have a hard drive,

You can make a swap partition by using a partitioning tool (DSL contains fdisk and cfdisk by default).

You can also use/create dos/windows type pagefiles.

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