DSL won't work

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: DSL won't work
started by: TheOneWithTheGun

Posted by TheOneWithTheGun on Aug. 14 2006,18:04

Over these past 2 months(or a bit less) I have been downloading and trying LOTS of Linux distros(about 15-20).None of them worked,sadly for me.Then I ran into DSL and when I saw on the site that its only 50MB and runz on Pentium 300Mhz and 32MB I was like "yay!Finally!".

Then I put my DSL CD in my drive and boot from it and it doesn't work.Now,Wwhen I press enter at boot a blank screen appears and the "caps lock" and 'scroll lock" LED begin to flash.Nothing happens een if you wait. So I try to make the "lowram" command.Everything was fine until before it loaded. It showed something like I/O Fatal Error etc...

Then I tried the fluxbox command.Still it loads and the nwhen it comes to 'Ready."(the third line it shows you after pressing enter) it freezes.

I am bored now and i am almsot going to cry(not really but I am sad). If DSL won't, I will not bother trying to find other Linux distros that will work on my pentium.Thats it,there will e no Linux for me.

Code Sample

My system:
Pentium II 356Mhx(not sure but its something like that.I am sure its 320Mhz + tough)
128MB RAM
and an IGS 1680_A graphics card.

Posted by kerry on Aug. 14 2006,20:25

Are you burning the disks correctly? They must be burned as a image at 4x on a cdr. The slow burning speed is the important part, if you burn it to fast it might not get everything and you will always get lots of errors.

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Aug. 14 2006,22:56

Those 2 led lights signify a kernel panic - that's bad enough to even get there.
Could be your cd media is corrupt/bad (as kerry stated)

Did you try "failsafe" and/or other bootcodes?
What exact error did you get when using lowram?

Posted by TheOneWithTheGun on Aug. 15 2006,06:55

I butned DSL with Nero as "Burn Image" to disk at 4x and I the error was something like 'Couldn't start the X server"

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Aug. 15 2006,18:26

So you just won't get the gui - but everything else loads without errors before this? -Was there a reason that X could not start?
You might want to check your system log files. (i.e. dmesg ,etc.)

Posted by sankarv on Aug. 21 2006,04:16

do a md5sum check of the iso u burned.

anyway try with some higher ram than 32 mb. you can use the cheatcode for jwm for this amount of ram i think.

do a reburning and try with that.

Posted by fioddor on Aug. 23 2006,17:59

Don't give up yet. I've got a 486 machine with 32 MB RAM and DSL 1.5 and it loads, so it is not a lack of resources. It must be something else. :laugh:

Posted by humpty on Aug. 23 2006,23:23

2 months of toil & torture, 15-21 distros, and none of them work. doesn't that sorta give you a clue about your hardware?