Finally! Installed on a 486 laptop! <G>

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Finally! Installed on a 486 laptop! <G>
started by: corster

Posted by corster on April 24 2005,05:02

Woohoo! I've been tinkering with this on and off for the past year and I finally got DSL going on an old old laptop that is kind of my experimental machine. However, I am running into an issue with the display. It seems no matter what resolution I select it is always the same greenish color (yes I've read other posts about frame buffering but since it is a HD install I never even get a boot: prompt for me to be able to hit F2 or enter fb800x600. Anyone know of another way to get this to do what I want. I can, however, load it in 4 bit without the green but it still seems like it is displaying at 640x480. I know the laptop can handle more because I have another HD with win98 on it at that resolution.

For those that are curious here are the specs:

NEC Versa V/75 laptop 486 75 Mhz
20 Mb of RAM (4 standard with a 16 Mb Expansion card)
540 Mb hard drive (one of about 10 that I have... I hit the jackpot on ebay one day and got a lot of 9

)
Wireless PCMCIA Network Card (worked like a charm at first boot of DSL)
NO working floppy or cd dirves whatsoever. I've had to use a 2.5" to 3.5" HD adapter and install it onto a desktop first. In the past I had always gotten LILO errors, but I guess perseverence pays off.

So far I have been able to install RedHat 7.0, Slackware 9.0, and now DSL on this little laptop. Even with the display wierdness I still consider it a great useable install.

Posted by skaos on April 24 2005,14:26

DSL uses the slimmed Xvesa X-server and this requires a Vesa 2.0 compliant card and it may be that your laptop is too old. If I remember correctly you can use Xvesa -listmodes to list resolutions and colour depths that your card supports.

Posted by corster on April 24 2005,20:34

Good tip! Apparently the laptop will only run 640x480 modes (and less). One other wierd thing though. When I do set to 4 bit 640x480 some applications will no longer run like dillo. Normally it would come up with the inverted colors and dillo would show the initial DSL page, but when I actually lower color depth dillo will no longer run.

Oh well, it's all fun anyway

Now on to my next project.

-cor-

Posted by skaos on April 25 2005,11:39

You can get higher resolutions and colour depths if you install and configure the myDSL Xfree86 package from the mydsl/system directory in one of the download sites. This probably will also fix the colour problem.

Several of the applications requires at least 8 bit colour and Dillo is one of them.