Laptops :: Ancient, broken laptop: almost working!

Hello,

Am trying to get an ancient laptop working with DSL, to use as a firewall on my home network.

The laptop is an "ORIS" (think it is a un-badged toshiba?)
- Tillamook-MMX CPU (called mobile pentium in linux) 300mhz
- 64mb ram
- no hard drive
- usb cdrom
- floppy
- neomagic magicgraph 128x graphic adapter

I used a DOS 6.22 boot disk, with utilities to get the usb cdrom working under DOS - usbaspi.sys and usbcd.sys (thanks to the puppy linux people)

After booting, the usb cdrom appears as drive G:

I used loadlin to boot DSL, as follows:

"loadlin @dsl.par" where dsl.par contains:

g:\boot\isolinux\linux24
initrd=g:\boot\isolinux\minirt24.gz
dsl 2 lang=us noagp nofirewire noswap noapic nopcmcia base norestore

The laptop boots to the console prompt without any apparent errors.

When I try Xvesa (using 800x600, 16) it creates the Xauthority file and just goes blank, no errors, just blank. I tried several other Xvesa resolution and color depth combinations, same result.

When I try using FBServer, with fb800x600 in the boot command, after the Xauthority file is created, I get the following error:

modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module fb0
XIO: fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X server ": 0.0" after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining.

It goes back to the console prompt - which still functions.

Any help, suggestions or comments from others who have faced such problems much appreciated.

Regards,

Geoff.

Hi
Have you tried just putting the live cd in the usb drive then booting from the usb-floppy downloaded from the DSL ftp site? It worked for me on one of my systems.
You might want to search for neomagic adapter in the forum. It seems to me there has been some discussions in the past with problems with that hardware.

good luck

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback. Tried your suggestion and now am booting the old laptop from a 'bootfloppy-usb.img' floppy disk, that then starts DSL from a usb drive stick.

Got it working by using "vga=788" in the boot parameters - that is 800x600, 16bit. Also specified: noicons noagp noswap noddc nomce noapic norestore.

Very pleased to report that even this old laptop is now running DSL, despite no hard disk and a pretty awful screen.

Now to "fix" the software part of the problem!

Bye for now,

Geoff.

original here.