Laptops :: dsl on my new laptop



hello folks,

next week i will get my new laptop from ebay. it is a siemens mobile 710, withh 233 mhz, 128 mb, a cd-drive and a 4 gb hd.

perfect for dsl and surfing from the university.

i hope my question doesn't sound too stupid:

what do i have to do to setup dsl on this box? what types of partitions, how many? and so on...

i hope you can help me with this....

thank you!
all you have to to is boot up knoppix (Ice WM) then run qt parted and then boot up dsl and check the getting strarted guide and then a install script will put it on for ya.

- Hope that helps.
Everyone has their own preferences, but here is what I would do:

1) Boot up the DSL livecd.  If your computer does not support booting from CDROM drive, then download the boot floppy image from the DSL website and get the RAWRITE32.exe program and create a boot floppy disk.  Then use the boot floppy + liveCD to start up DSL.

2) Open up an xterminal window and type:

sudo su
cfdisk /dev/hda


Assuming that you are ready to blow away all of your existing data storage (you might want to back up any Siemens special laptop drivers and other important stuff in case you want to re-install the original OS), create 3 new partitions:

hda1     Linux  Type  83   Size 3GB
hda2     Linux Swap Type 82 Size 256MB
leaving 768MB of unpartitioned space for future use

Your DSL installation will go to partition hda1
Your DSL swap partition will be hda2

Type type:

mkswap /dev/hda2
swapon /dev/hda2


Then follow the hd install script as described here in the forums. FAQ is here: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/dsl-hd-install.html

So you type:

dsl-hdinstall


and then:

mkliloboot


and follow the instructions EXACTLY.  In other words, if it tells you to type "hda1" then you type in "hda1".  But if it tells you to type in "/dev/hda1" then you type in "/dev/hda1"

Good Luck.
Quote (cbagger01 @ Dec. 25 2004,23:17)
hda1     Linux  Type  83   Size 3GB
hda2     Linux Swap Type 82 Size 256MB
leaving 768MB of unpartitioned space for future use

Your DSL installation will go to partition hda1
Your DSL swap partition will be hda2

Type type:

mkswap /dev/hda2
swapon /dev/hda2

I'd skip the creation of a swap partition.  His Laptop has 128MB of RAM, that's more than enough to run DSL and then some.  I have 256MB on my computer and DSL has never used over 50MB.  That's just my take on it, but if you think you're going to be using a lot of heavy programs, like graphical games and such, a swap file will probably be useful.  But if you're only going to be doing school stuff on it, like word processing, and surfing the web you'll be just fine without it.  If anything you can just add another partition from the Free Space, which I'd also recommend having.  I have DSL installed on a 300MB and a 15MB partition of a 1.2GB HD, the other 900MB are just Free Space right now.
"Everyone has their own preferences, but here is what I would do"

While swapfile may not strictly be necessary, it is better if your computer does not crash whenever your memory usage reaches 128.00001MB

It is possible to use all 128MB with DSL, therefore a swapfile is a good precaution, especially for disk and memory intensive programs and also users who multi-task.

The usual rule-of-thumb is 2x - 2.5x RAM (within reason. That amount is probably not needed for a 1.0GB RAM system)

Since you have a fairly large hard drive for DSL (4.0GB), then you won't miss the 256MB of swap space very much.

I also like leaving some unused space because it allows for the  testing of other operating systems, and it also allows for you to create a temporary storage area for backups.  For example, you may be able to do a hard disk image backup of hda1 and then archive it to hda3 before burning to CD-RW or storing it on a network file server.
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