booting problems with 486SX
Forum: Laptops
Topic: booting problems with 486SX
started by: jcline
Posted by jcline on Feb. 02 2006,04:40
I'm trying to get DSL onto my old thinkpad 510Cs, whichhas an IBM 486BL2-50 cpu (no math coprocessor).
Following advice on this forum, I got the last version
of DSL which boots on 486SX, 0.5.3.1. I am booting
from the floppy, after copying KNOPPIX onto my hard
drive (d: partition). The boot starts fine, with the fairly innocuous-looking error message
"You passed an undefined mode number."
The kernel starts booting, KNOPPIX is found on the hard drive, and it starts to load things onto the ramdisk, but then
there is a kernel panic with lots of messages, including
"Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000004, segmentation fault, FAT: bogus logical sector size 0, Kernel panic VFS unable to mount root FS on 01:01"
So I am at a dead end for now. Are there some kernel parameters I could try to pass that might allow me to boot?
Or is there some other solution to the lack of the math
coprocessor?
Posted by skaos on Feb. 02 2006,11:46
How much memory do you have?
Posted by jcline on Feb. 03 2006,01:16
When I boot windows, it reports 640K base memory + 11456K extended.
The computer comes with 4MB originally installed,
and there is an 8MB DRAM card added.
When I start to boot DSL, it tells me that 9608 kB is the total
available memory.
Posted by cbagger01 on Feb. 03 2006,04:59
Hmm...You MIGHT be able to get away with:
| Code Sample |
| dsl 1 vga=normal atapicd noideraid nosound noapic noacpi acpi=off noscsi noapm nousb nopcmcia nofirewire noagp nomce |
You also may need to add "mem=12M" at the end if you don't see the correct amount of RAM.
Posted by skaos on Feb. 03 2006,11:42
If you can't get it to work, you could take a look at: < http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/baslinux/ >
Posted by jcline on Feb. 03 2006,16:38
Thanks for that advice! Using those parameters(except dsl->knoppix, and I keep pcmcia) including
mem=12M, it boots , though very slowly.
Now the real fun begins!
Actually, I have now tried runlevel 5, and X starts,
but it is so slow that it is unusable. Maybe I should
try basic linux as suggested by skaos. But before giving
up, do you think there is any hope of getting X to run
faster under DSL?
Posted by cbagger01 on Feb. 04 2006,05:24
To have any chance, the first thing you should to is create a dos swapfile or a linux swap partition.Then your OS will free up memory by swapping unused code/buffers to the disk drive.
However, it is hard to get by with that small amount of memory.
If at all possible, install more memory.
Although it is a little older, Basic Linux or maybe Deli Linux would be better choices for such a machine, especially if you do not install more RAM.
But give the swapfile or swap partition a try and see if it helps.
It is also a good idea to use the MINIMAL theme/style if you are using X windows. It uses less RAM & CPU, although the default DSL theme back then was pretty minimal too.
Posted by jcline on Feb. 04 2006,16:54
Actually I already was using a swap partition, 16M.Do you think it would help to increase its size?
Looks like I should be able to find a 16MB dram card, so
that will get me up to 20MB. I will try to order it.
As far as getting a minimal desktop, is this something I
can specify at the boot prompt, or will I have to play with this after making DSL bootable from the hard drive (which I
haven't yet figured out how to do)? The possible desktops
which can be specified at the boot prompt are listed as:
gnome icewm fluxbox xfce wmaker twm
I prefer fvwm, and am not sure which of the above would be
least demanding.
Incidentally, I get a few other error messages while booting,
no autofs mounts configured
chgrp: failed to get attributes of `/ramdisk/opt': no such file or directory
chgrp: failed to get attributes of `/ramdisk/opt/bashburnrc': no such file or directory
/usr/sbin/xsetup: failed to get attributes of `/opt/xsetup`
Posted by cbagger01 on Feb. 05 2006,05:10
It is a good idea to have a decent amount of total memory (RAM + SWAP = 64MB or larger), but your available hard drive space may be a limiting factor.DSL 0.5.3.1 only comes with fluxbox, so that is your only choice for a window manager unless you manually install and configure a different one. Fluxbox is already very efficient and uses little RAM, so you will not see a big improvement with a different one.
You can choose the "minimal" Style from the Fluxbox menu. There was no boot-time cheatcode to do this back in version 0.5.3.1
The extra RAM will be a big help.
However, you should still refrain from using programs that do a lot of floating point match calculations like MP3 / media players, because they will run very poorly on a 486SX without a math coprocessor. If you could somehow get and install a 487 math coprocessor, you could then use one of the newer versions of DSL.