Problems with a Designote 5500

Forum: Laptops
Topic: Problems with a Designote 5500
started by: icevapor

Posted by icevapor on Dec. 15 2006,23:21

Hello,

I recently bought a Leo Designote 5500 off of ebay for $10. I plan on makeing it a Digital picture frame. This machine has:

-Pentium 166
-16mg Ram
-NeoMagic MagicGraph 128ZV graphics controller
-usb
-12.1 inch screen

I recently got DSL to work on a IBM thinkpad 365x... no cdrom, no usb... huge pain. So I figured the 5500 wouldnt be that hard... turns out Im wrong.

I am having a little trouble:

-First, it wouldnt boot from the cd. No biggy, I just used loadlin to get it to run off the HD or the CD

-Second, the video was all messed up.. not a problem either, I just used vga=0x314 (this gives me 800x600 at 16 bit... i think). That seemed to fix the problem and gave me the nice penguin in the top left corner during boot.

-My last problem... When I boot to X, it pops up with a gray screen with an x in the middle of it. When I move the mouse the x moves like it is supposed to. But if I dont move it for about 10 second and try to move it again.. it seems locked. If I keep trying to move it, it will eventually starts to move (during this time, I can CTL-ALT-Backspace to kill X) This gets steadily worst untill the cursor x doesnt move at all, and i cant kill x. But it still is cranking on the cdrom as if it is working.

I decided to just let it sit... and think. I left for 2 hours and came back and it was booted into Fluxbox or jwm.. I dont know.. but it was frozen.

I have tried different boot labels like lowram and install. I also tried turning off about every thing using cheatcodes (noideraid nosound noapic noacpi acpi=off noscsi noapm nousb nopcmcia nofirewire nomce) I cant get it to boot into X and not be frozen.

Is there any way to log what is happening... While it boots so I can maybe figure it out? or install in a text mode?

Please help..

Thanks

Posted by roberts on Dec. 16 2006,01:37

Since you are using loadlin, then I assume you have dos/windows on the hard drive. So...

How about booting up to runlevel 2 like this:

boot: dsl 2

Then at the prompt type:

mkdosswapfile

Having a swap file should help some.
Also be sure to use dsl v3.1 and if needed boot with the dosswapfile option to be sure the swapfile is being used.