Laptops :: Laptop boot problems

I have a 486 with 16mb ram, and 160 mb hard drive. i have already installed using only a floppy disk (that is all i have), uncompressed dsl, created a 64 mb swap (initialized it, but not sure it is working), and am booting with a boot floppy.

at the boot screen, i type "dsl vga=771". it loads linux24 and gives the error:
"you passed an undefined mode number. press return to see video modes available, space to continue or wait 30 secs"
so I press return and it gives me 7 VGA modes to choose from. so i choose one (doesnt seem to matter which one i choose -> 80x60) then it scans and loasds a bunch of stuff.

then it goes into DSL X Setup, asks me if I want to use Xvesa or Xfbdev xserver. I choose Xfbdev. i say No to "USB mouse", and yes to "IMPS/2 mouse", and i choose a us keyboard.

Then it tries to do some stuff with "bootlocal.sh" file, but it says No such file or directory exists. it creates 2 new xauthority files. Then I get the following error:

"XIO: fatal IO error 104 (connection reset by peer) on X server ':0.0" after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining"

then i get a command line : dsl@tty1[dsl]$

also, if I simply press return at the boot menu, it goes through all the processes, and ends up with an empty screen. it seems like it is working at that point, but it just isnt displayed.

any help?

i forgot, i also get the error: modprobe: modprobe: can't locate module fb0

please help

Are you sure the disk is 160 MB? A uncompressed standard install takes a bit more than 120 MB. This plus swap is more than the disk capacity, so it may be that you don't have a complete install. If so, I suggest that you use a 20 MB swap partition and the rest for DSL.

Run "Xvesa -listmodes" (without quotes) at the command line to find what resolutions and colour depths your graphics card supports (the maximum may be 640x480 @ 16 colours). Then run xsetup.sh and startx.

I tried in vain to get a frugal to work on an older 486 laptop. I had 40m and it just wasn't enough horse power. I did get a HD install to work, but I needed XFree. I had exactly the same errors. Getting a command line install was not a problem, it was trying to get a GUI that hosed things.

David

Your 486 probably doesn't have a video card that supports VESA2.0 graphics modes that are used by the Vesa xfbdev and the XVesa servers.

You may be able to solve by doing a hd install from the text prompt and then download and install xfree86 and configure it for your video card setup, like spotslayer did.

It is a pain in the butt to do, but it is possible.

You could also try some of the other available frame buffers in the F3 boot menu and see if xfbdev will work with one of them.

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