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Installation Crashing - Plunkyy - 09-22-2025
I'm trying to install Damn Small Linux on a Thinkpad 600X with a 650Mhz speed-step Pentium 3 processor. I'm booting off a cd-rom, and I've tried to install it about 8-10 times now. The first or second time, I managed to get all the way through the installer, but it said that it failed to install grub. I just rebooted and tried it again in hopes it would fix itself the next time (with default settings). This obviously didn't work.
The past few installs I've tried have all crashed somewhere in the 19-23% range, with the most recent step being "Copying new system" in the live log. I've let the installer verify the installation media most times, and never had an error. So I don't think that my CD-ROM drive is faulty, but I could be wrong. I will also note that as of writing this, the most recent crash was at 23%, which I left the live install on after it crashed, and a few minutes later my 600X graphics went haywire for a minute or so. After that, it went to a black screen (still on!) and then rebooted into the live environment by itself! The uptime was still counting after this as well so the machine never actually rebooted...
Anyways, I'm just looking to at least narrow down the problem here. I'm (trying) to install to a 64GB Yansen IDE SSD which is almost certainly just a pre-assembled msata to ide converter. Other than the SSD and the CD-ROM, I'm not really sure what the issue could be. I don't really understand why it could go through the entire installation the first time, but now it can't. I also don't understand why the graphics glitches out when I shut the laptop down, or when it happened in the previous paragraph on its own. It has a Neomagic MagicGraph256ZX GPU with 4mb of VRAM. The live installer responds well so the graphics is definitely supported in the kernel. I dunno.
Appreciate any suggestions
EDIT: I managed to pass the 19-23% crash range by booting with failsafe graphics. I got back up to the point where grub installation fails. Then, I entered the rbind commands for /proc, /sys, etc. so that I could use lsblk in chroot of /mnt/antiX. This let me chroot in and manually run grub-install and update-grub commands. Then, I rebooted and got the following error:
"fsck.ext4: error while loading shared libraries: libuuid.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory. fsck exited with status code 127". It's a little hard for me to debug exactly what's wrong because I'm not sure what exactly happened during the automated installation process.
RE: Installation Crashing - grindstone - 09-24-2025
It will take more time to fully-respond than I have at the moment and I can't get to the right machine, but a couple quick thoughts for now.
- Can't recall if that uses cli-installer (found in /usr/local/bin) or minstall (maybe poke around in CD loop mount) or otherwise findable on either github or gitlab or whatever it was they use -- check upstream at antiX forum. Either way, you should be better able to understand what's happening during installation once you get eyes on those.
- I think the P3 of that vintage is pushing it for Bookworm-based things in terms of X and mesa. Honestly, I'd try antiX 22-based things (still supported) to go one rev backward in the ecosystem.
- I once tested RAM limits systematically in the net installer of antiX in VBox and had installer symptoms like that with insufficient RAM. Testing from 256MB on up, incrementing by 32, the installer didn't complete successfully and install grub until 416MB was available. Not in a position to check that installer at the moment. Call it a FWIW.
- Again, I'm not in a spot to checkthe restore file package list, but you can dig in /usr/local/bin/restore for the url to the tar file, pull that down, and see if that gets you the libuuid if it's not in your installation.
The fact that you got as far as you did "by hand" means the partition sizes and machine recognition must be usable (?) although I have no experience trying such a device installation. If you have another machine on which you can install it to that same device, you can at least confirm that you get that 100% right to begin with and then just reconfigure X and change UUID's in fstab etc when back in the 600X machine
Applaud the heroic effort. Still think it's probably pushing past the hardware limits a bit, but love the initiative. If you can post an
Code:
inxi -Fv7Just an idea, but maybe if you get a "known good" install all the way through using another host computer, at least you can stop questioning the integrity of the baseline.
RE: Installation Crashing - Plunkyy - 09-24-2025
Appreciate the response. I'll give it another go on the weekend maybe and see if I can't get it working. I will note that my 600X has ~448mb of RAM I think (max of 576mb iirc) so that's just a tad past the 'limit' you found (though that may have changed, who knows). X on the live environment actually runs just fine once everything is uncompressed, and the neomagic video drivers on debian were even updated as recently as 2023 surprisingly.
I will also note that since posting, I've tried both PuppyLinux (bookworm edition) and Adelie Linux (LXQT I think), both have not worked for various reasons. With PuppyLinux, I thought the issue was the vesa graphics driver so I put the neomagic xorg drivers on a USB and installed them before launching the live environment, but the keyboard and mouse were completely unresponsive either way. On Adelie Linux, I couldn't even get into a live environment, it was just stuck loading sddm forever.
Might just bite the bullet and install gentoo if I can't get DSL to work after trying the stuff you mentioned here, at least that way I can go step-by-step and hopefully have a better idea of what's giving me issues here. I just want an old Linux laptop that I can work on without being distracted by the modern web
RE: Installation Crashing - grindstone - 09-25-2025
You sound close. Had another idea. Maybe a variant of the same basic plan. If you can brew a DSL you like in (say) VBox, do the restore, update & upgrade, customize, snapshot it (and/or live-usb-maker) that gets you a known-good image hopefully faster than working on the target machine (apt-cache search for cli-snapshot) The point of doing that is to try to "route around" an install by preparing all that for a later frugal install. So you could do some minimal gentoo (with it's own grub controlling the 600X) and then just do a frugal install of DSL. They're sort of like zip-slack was except intead of UMSDOS volumes they're yunno ext4 (etc) filesystems laying on the host system. It's a bit more work up-front, but it changes the 600X installation to just a copy of squash volumes and it's fast. I forget just now, but basically you use the frugal to generate the few "boot" lines that go into (?) /etc/40_grub_custom (apology this all from memory) and then boot & do the update-grub on your actual host system to detect it. There's a YT video that's good on teh antiX stuff by one of the MX devs 'nymmed DolphinOracle. Then you've already go all the stuff on the right drive and you're a couple chroots away from two hosts on the device.
There are a few permutations of this general plan that could apply. Say that, after you get DSL updated and customized the way you want in the VM, you choose to use the live usb maker to make a stick to be used for the frugal (because it became GB after your updates/customizing), you could use a Plop CD to be able to boot it if the BIOS wont do USB boots.
The frugals are basically 2 filesystem files -- a user and a linuxfs and the only pain/downside in my own usage is that upgrading the kernels in them is a separate multiple-step process itself.
My hunch is that the USB would be 1.1 or something and too slow to run off of, but suitable for a one-off installation to the disk. I wanna say (?) it was static persistent that sounded the most safe, but the YT video walks you through.
So, since you're modern-web-free, say nothing much linux-ey works right for a host system--you could make even (say) NTFS volume and put XP on it and the frugal would exist on your NTFS volume. There's a _ton_ of flexibility in the antiX "stuff".
You have many options.
Keep us posted if you feel like it.