Running DSL on a Toshiba Satellite 210CT
Forum: Laptops
Topic: Running DSL on a Toshiba Satellite 210CT
started by: HighWire
Posted by HighWire on July 01 2006,18:10
Hello, DSL community. I'm not sure if the creators of this little monster hang around a lot, but if you guys are out here, let me congratulate you on this fantastic piece of software!I have tried running DSL on a few computers in my house and they all operate perfectly. Now, I want to get it to work on my old Laptop. A Toshiba Satellite 210CT (Though google search results seem to show more of the same device with 210CS as keyword... Oh well.)
I'm not aware of a lot of it's further specifications, but I'm sure that there is a Pentium processor present, along with 16MB RAM (Probably the cause of my suffering?).
When I want to boot the laptop into DSL, using the syslinux iso file, is where the trouble starts. The laptop recognises the floppy and runs the syslinux application. But when I get past the boot prompt (in which you can add parameters prior booting into DSL) everything goes backwards.
It loads linux24 & minirt24.gz, and recognises the knoppix file on the CD-ROM (also placed and tested it from the HD)
It sets up the required directories, and BANG! Segmentation fault. Another Segmentation fault follows shortly.
I end up in a prompt [Enter runlevel] and that's pretty much it. Typing a number only ends up with the message 'no more processes left in this runlevel'.
--
I have no idea what is going on. I tried the booting method on other PCs flawlessly. Any ideas? Oh, when trying to boot into DSL, it says I have 13444MB RAM memory. Is that normal for a 16MB Ram laptop?
Posted by cbagger01 on July 02 2006,16:10
You can try a lowram bootup by typing this at the boot prompt:lowram mem=16M
where "mem" is lowercase and the "M" at the end is uppercase
Or for text mode, boot with this on a single line:
| Code Sample |
| dsl 1 vga=normal atapicd noideraid nosound noapic noacpi acpi=off noscsi noapm nousb nopcmcia nofirewire noagp nomce mem=16M |
and then manually create a swap partition and format it. Then reboot with the lowram command.
Posted by HighWire on July 02 2006,20:20
You rock! I wish it would have shown up on the screen you get to see when pressing F2.Right, I've been formatting the hard drive, creating a swap partition, a linux partition, and a Win95FAT partition (Fat32, I assume?)
When I boot now, it recognises the SWAP partition and uses it, but it still complains about not being able to place several files into directories such as /home and /ramdisk. Any suggestions for that? I tried the lowram tag accompanying mem=16M but it still puts me into the text mode.
Thanks in advance!
Posted by dani.zafra on July 15 2006,16:21
Hi there, I installed DSl in a Toshiba Satellite 230CX some days ago... no ethernet... 132Mhz, 16M RAM.. 1G HD... and I've many problems to get it in, but I win 
for now... First of all, I use mem=16M and vga=normal cheats codes in the boot, it was exactly tihs: "install mem=16M vga=normal lang=es" at the end... I could see the install menu. I decided to frugal-grub-install (don't like lilo), and I select the partition which was format, etc..., but setting up grub it fails! So I decided change my mind and select hd-install, but it fails too in "mk2fs" or something like that. The root of this problem, and maybe your problem too, was that /ramdisk , don't know why, is READ-ONLY!!!! and into the dsl-hdinstall script many temp files are created into /tmp (symblink to /ramdisk/tmp). I resolved this... deleting /tmp and creating a folder instead named /tmp. Then the script runs very good and everything was done 
.Try this and good luck!
Now I'm trying to conf my sndcard...
Sorry for my english.