Ti Extensa 570CD

Forum: Laptops
Topic: Ti Extensa 570CD
started by: cacruz

Posted by cacruz on Sep. 18 2006,16:21

HiGang, I've been trying for the last two days to play with DSL, and find that alot can be done. The laptop I use for my every day work is a IBM Thinkpad R52 with 1.5GB in RAM. But I will like to use DSL in my old Extensa 570CD that has the CD broken but a working 3COM network PCMCIA card. My Thinkpad doen't have a diskette drive. But I have an external USB HD case for 2.5 hdd's. I have booted my Thinkpad with the DSL CD and used the 3com in orther to have Internet acces, (that is how i'm wrtting this post) and have installed the extensa's hdd in the external case. The 1.4GB hdd has been partitioned in a 200MB swap and 1.2GB linux file systems. I activated the swap partition, Then proceeded to do a "install to hard drive" from the desktop to the dsa2 partition, it successfully installed in the hdd.
Then put it back in the old Extensa but did not booted. I also tried installing it by using the :"install to usb pen drive" and used the "for usb hdd", it didnt worked.
Can anyone pleas help me.
Thanks in advance

Posted by rja on Sep. 18 2006,19:10

When you installed dsl to the usb drive on sda2, the drive
was setup to boot as sda2.

If you take the drive out of the usb enclosure and put it
into your laptop attached to ide, then it becomes "hda2".

If you did a grub install, then mount sda2, edit (I think the file is)
/mnt/sda2/boot/grub/menu.lst
and change any "sda2" to "hda2".

Posted by cacruz on Sep. 21 2006,04:38

Thanks rja for your help. Unfortunately I used lilo as loader. In order to make it work used a LGH-IDE-K adapter which allows you to use a laptop HDD in a IDE chain. Then used a PC to load DSL with the CD and then partition the disk creating two partitions hda1 and hda2. Gave it a swap type to one of the partitions, the a reboot of the system. After boot up used the Copy to hard disk.
It has allowed me to boot my old Extensa. But, there is always a but right? My desktop looks really bad. I have seen screenshots of other 800 x 600 256 colors tft screens that are too far from what I see in mine. I tried configuring Xvesa but it didnt help. My laptop uses a Cirrus Logic controller.
Is there a way to force the operating system to discover its new environment?. My desktops pc used to install the os in the hdd is clearly different that my old Extensa 570CD.
Thanks in advance.

Posted by rja on Sep. 22 2006,01:13

I'm just guessing here.

Some info on installing an old RedHat version on that laptop:

< http://gamgee.acad.emich.edu/~roth/EXTENSA/ >

You could try either booting with:

boot: fb800x600

or stick with:

boot: dsl

and try using mydsl to load XFree86.dsl from the System section.
Read the info file for XFree86.dsl first.

Posted by cacruz on Sep. 23 2006,21:03

rja, Thanks once again. It is Saturday and I can play with my DSL Project. This is where I´m standing.
Got the extensa to work with dsl, but the screen lokks really crappy. I have done a xsetup.sh configured to 600x800 and 8 bit screen depth. The system recognizes the cirrus adapter and has loaded the driver, so I think.
When this old laptop had win 95 and win 98 the 256 colors could be shown in the TFT LDC display and it used to look great, now running dsl just is really dissapointing.
I will let you know how it went after loding the mydsl.
Have a nice weekend.