DSL onto Toshiba Libretto

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: DSL onto Toshiba Libretto
started by: Stephanie

Posted by Stephanie on Oct. 31 2006,17:08

Great work on a nifty linux distro.

DSL has proved to be almost perfect for breathing new life into my old Toshiba Libretto 100CT, although I've done everything 'wrong' along the way it's come out working good. I have a tendancy never to read the instructions, or at least not until I've really messed things up.

The Libretto has no cd, no internal floppy, won't boot from USB or PCMCIA, it's incredibly tiny and somewhat limited. I was running Xubuntu on it but it was tooooo ssslllloooooowwwww and I read that DSL was ideal for older machines with limited resources. I downloaded the ISO, but without a CD, USB, or PCMCIA option I tried it a bit differently. I already had Xubuntu on hda1 and swap on hda2 so I created two more partitions, hda3 and hda4. I mounted the iso through the loopback and then copied its contents into hda3, then rebooted and used GRUB to direct the computer to boot from the 'cd' in hda3. I then did the hard drive install routine to install to hda4.

Either I didn't do it right, or there was some kind of glitch in the process (maybe the live-cd doesn't like running from a partition on a hard drive?) because although it worked, some things didn't seem to be quite there, or quite right. But I didn't realize this till later on.

I played with this for a bit, decided I liked DSL and rigged up a hard drive that would be just DSL, so now I have DSL on its own hard drive in the Libretto. (Next will be to move it to a CF card with an IDE -> CF adaptor).

I then promptly broke everything... created my own user account and deleted the dsl user, changed a bunch of preferences, and basicaly broke all the stuff in /opt and the dsl-specific stuff in /etc/init. I hadn't figured out yet how DSL worked as far as saving and restoring personal settings... This is when I started to think maybe my hard drive install wasn't quite right - it all seemed to be acting as if the hard drive was like the live cd, sort of. (I still haven't read all the docs.)

Anyhow, skipping to the end, I've installed GCC, the extra libraries, broke fluxbox, broke X, restored X from a backup, downloaded the latest fluxbox and compiled it from source, changed the init scripts and rc#.d scripts, and now I've got something which runs quite nicely on my Libretto, but it's not Damn Small Linux any more. It's up to about 300MB on the hard drive, and nothing works like it originally did.

But, I'm happy and I couldn't have got here without DSL in the first place. And as an added bonus, I've learned a bunch more along the way.

So thanks!

-Stephanie

p.s. one thing I never did fix, is man. Even though there are man pages and I can see them, when I try man .... I get an error that the file doesn't exist, man is always looking for /knoppix/... but there's no knoppix in my / directory. Anyone know how to change man so it works like 'normal'?