IBM Personal Computer 300GL Success Story

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: IBM Personal Computer 300GL Success Story
started by: ufischer

Posted by ufischer on Oct. 24 2004,22:05

After trying GenToo (ran out of disk space after 2 days of chugging), and Linspire (LiveCD boots to L 80 80 80 .... repeating the 80 endlessly while churning the diskette drive mercilesslly for as long as I let it), I tried DSL.

After about 6 hours, (a lot of it spent searching for info in these forums) I had a hard disk install on my 2.56 GB Hard disk with Firefox browser up and running along with all the other apps included with the 0.8.2 iso.

My system has a P-MMX 166 Mhz 128 MB of PC-100 SDRAM, a diskette drive, and a CDR drive which I had lying around and installed on the box for this install. It has two ISA slots and 1 PCI slot (empty). There is an ancient Soundblaster in one ISA slot and a 3Com 3C509B NIC in the other.

The only outstanding issue for me in this install is getting past the login prompt that comes up just before startx runs. So far, I've not found a way to bypass that and have the system automatically logon as a specified user. This is not a huge deal, so I'm now looking for a quick way to copy this install to a bunch of other identical PCs that I have lying around.

What is the best bitwise disk duplicating freeware out there and where can I get it? I want to just take the HDs out of each of the other PCs in turn, install them as a 2nd HD on this box, and
duplicate the install from this PC's HD to the 2nd HD on a bit by bit basis.

I am very impressed with the ease of installation and relative speed of DSL compared to Windows 2000. I suspect that now that I know all the steps, I could install DSL on another obsolete PC in less time than it would take to get Windows 2000 installed and upgraded to SP4. The name should be changed to Damn Good Small Linux, then again, maybe in keeping with the Data communications standards acronym confusion, it should be Advanced Damn Small Linux

Posted by SaidinUnleashed on Oct. 24 2004,23:09

Welcome to the Revolution!!!

Don't feed the penguins.

-J.P.

EDITUS: ADSL = Awesome!! Damn Small Linux!

Posted by cbagger01 on Oct. 25 2004,05:23

While I have never done a hard disk install, I thought that there was an option to do the install without a "login:" prompt.

Maybe I am confused, however.

Posted by Delboy on Oct. 26 2004,12:44

welcome ufischer. The HD install script clicked from the fluxbox menu gives you the chance to avoid the log-in prompt.
Choose 'No' to " do you want multi-user logins?" and complete as normal. It should reboot straight through to the xscreen and the Dillo page.