New to linux and need help with installing dsl

Forum: HD Install
Topic: New to linux and need help with installing dsl
started by: MacrossFX

Posted by MacrossFX on Sep. 24 2005,05:42

Hey there all. I'm trying out a linux system for the first time. I'm installing dsl on a p120 mhz with 16mb of ram. I can't boot from the cd so I made a floppy boot disk but after uncompressing linux it gives me an error that the knoppix file system could not be find and brings me to what it says is a "very limited shell". I would like to know is it not supposed to read from the cd now? What do I do now? I read about copying some files to a KNOPPIX folder on c: but shouldn't the install work this way with a bootable floppy? Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Posted by MacrossFX on Sep. 24 2005,06:07

UPDATE

I got past the part I was stuck at. Turns out my old cdrom drive couldn't read cd-rws. Anyway I've run into another problem. After going through the installation on the command prompt screens it now goes to a screen with a blue background an x in the screen which seems to respond to mouse movements. My cdrom keeps working here but nothing is happening. Any thoughts?

Posted by Diana on Sep. 24 2005,15:49

I would like to try Linux on my old machine, too. It's a Pentium II, it's got a CD-ROM but I'm sure it's so ancient, it can't read current CDs so I would like to download linux to floppies and try to load it. Where did you download the files from? I reformatted my hard drive and just installed an MS DOS boot disk. I don't want to install windows since I just want to try Linux and see how it compares to windows (on my other computers). Can you help?

Posted by palloco on Sep. 24 2005,17:36

And why wouldn't it read new cds?
Even the 12x cdrom drive from my 486 reads new cds

Posted by cbagger01 on Sep. 24 2005,21:40

CD-R disks can usually be read by even very old drives.

My 2X CDROM drive can read a CD-R disk, but not a CD-RW disk.

However, older drives are often controlled by a custom interface from a sound card instead of a ATAPI/IDE controller on the motherboard.

For these systems, a "poormans install" is recommended.

Posted by cbagger01 on Sep. 24 2005,21:42

MacrossFX,

Try booting with:

lowram xsetup

or

dsl vga=xxx xsetup

where "xxx" is a framebuffer mode from the F3 menu.

Then choose the xfbdev driver when prompted.

xvesa might also work for lower resolutions like 800x600x16bit for example.

Posted by MacrossFX on Sep. 25 2005,03:05

UPDATE

I got it up and running by doing the hd install first. I think my cdrom as too slow to run it as a livecd. Anyway I got it up and running but I have some problems and questions:

1. I can get into the main desktop window. The background however is a patterned grey/white and I can't seem to change it with the wallpaper selector. Is there a way to change it?

2. When I boot up dsl after entering my username and password, is there a way to just boot-up into a command line interface instead of right into X? Even though dsl is small, X still runs sluggish on this old machine and I'd rather just use a command line interface and boot into X when I really need it.

3. I'm not sure if this is hardware related but it seems when the cpu load is on full load, the system seems to just lockup. I understand this is an old cpu and maybe dsl won't be able to save it.

4. (This is related to 3) I may be able to get a hold of a pentium 2xx mhz system with 32mb of ram. Would that run dsl significantly better than my current pentium 120 mhz with 16mb ram?

Posted by cbagger01 on Sep. 25 2005,05:57

1. Your chosen graphics mode is too low color depth for wallpaper setting.

2. Edit your bootloader config file and add the number

2

to your "append" statement. This will tell DSL to boot into runlevel 2 which is command line text interface

3. DMA is probably not enabled for your hard drive. Try opening a terminal window and type:

sudo su
hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda

and see if your computer loading/disk access is better.

If so, add the "dma" word to your append statement, or add the

hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda

to your /opt/bootlocal.sh file.

4. Yes. The new processor will help, but the extra 16MB of RAM will do wonders for your performance. Also, make sure that you create a swap partition or swap file on your hard drive. Finally, I recommend adding the minimal parameter to your append statement or better yet, add the parameters listed at the bottom of this wiki page:

< http://damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Cheat_Codes >

to reduce OS memory usage.

Posted by soqquadro on Sep. 25 2005,12:06

I tried the "normal" hd installation, but after lilo/grub choice is not possible to boot from hd (on hda1 W98, on hdb1 ext2, on hdb2 swap). Did I miss something? Thanks

Posted by MacrossFX on Sep. 25 2005,17:25

I opened up an xterminal window but I can't seem to do anything in it. Anything i type doesn't work. It doesn't seem to be the same as the unix systems setup at my school where opening a terminal window will put me right into a directory whereas here when i open a terminal it says something along the lines of root@tty1. What am i supposed to do?

Posted by MacrossFX on Sep. 25 2005,20:40

UPDATE

I think I've got the hang of it now. The reason why I wasn't getting full performance was because I didn't make a swap partition. Doh! Anyway it seems ok now. Now the question is where is the bootfile located and what is it called? Also, do I just edit it under a text editor?