compaq contura aero 4/33c

Forum: Laptops
Topic: compaq contura aero 4/33c
started by: theccsscontact

Posted by theccsscontact on Sep. 08 2005,22:11

well there is no co processor, it has 12 mb of ram and like 80 mb harddrive, ive had it fully installed and booting fine through freedos with loadlin and using the .08 floppy on hard drive with the cd image all there well thats not the prob

i need to find out how to get it to have math co emulation

ive done a lil research and found out theres a flag to parse to the kernal no387 but it says that CONFIG_BUGi386 has to be defind for the flag to work. im not big into kernal work so any tips or help would be great! btw heres some sites and things that i found usefull so far

< http://lists.debian.org/debian-knoppix/2003/04/msg00063.html >

man pages searched for bootparam "refer to n0387 flag"

so yea im not giving up but help is always better thx in advance

if i manage to figure it out tonight ill post it, but im sadly assuming im guna have to recompile a kernal which is something i dont know how to do "well never tried" . . . anyway peace

Posted by theccsscontact on Sep. 08 2005,22:48

ok messed around a bit more with a difrent system using lilo i typed linux n0387 and it tried using the flag but there is no support for math co emulation in the kernal it seems, it would have just emulated otherwise right? it gave up as if there was no co processor

Posted by Onyarian on Sep. 09 2005,06:54

I have the same Contura, but with W95, how can I install like you the DSL on it?
there is no CD, no USB, only a FD for the PCMCIA

Thanks,
Onyarian

Posted by theccsscontact on Sep. 09 2005,07:10

ok first off i took it apart and took outthe harddrive, bought a ide to laptop hd converter and did a hdd install, noticed once booting in the contura it wouldnt load lilo

literally the screen would just say LI and freeze

sooo

i downloaded

FreeDOS

installed it

grabed loadlin and the .08 floppy disk coppied the floppy contents to the hard drive

coppied the cd image to the hard drive

pointed all files to the neccisary areas

created a autoexec.bat laodin the kernal files from the floppy

and watched the magic work, but! once it started booting it failed with a panic from the kernal saying theres no math co processor and now im stuck

but theres hope! i found a os called BasicLinux < http://www.volny.cz/basiclinux/ >

im trying this kernal out right now, my goal is to still use damn small i havent even looked at basic yet but it seems like all will be fine, till the next update all questions and help welcome

Posted by theccsscontact on Sep. 09 2005,09:11

ha frigin hard drive died probably guna do some sorta external mod with it then because i have no hd's of the correct demensions, and size. so till i get an idea thx and feedback is welcomed

Posted by kopsis on Sep. 09 2005,18:58

That "n0387" kernel param is probably "no387" (as in there is "no" "80387" coprocessor).

Be aware that X11 on an aero is only marginally usable. Once upon a time I got Slackware running on an Aero (back in the days of the 2.2 kernel). I even managed to get X11 to work but the machine spent so much time swapping to disk at that point that it was basically unusable. However if you can stick to console mode apps (Lynx, Mutt, Vim, etc.) and avoid starting X11, then Linux on the Aero works pretty well

Posted by Onyarian on Sep. 13 2005,06:42

Thanks theccsscontact,

I'm looking to buy this adapter and to install the DSL.
If you have other problems in this install, it would be nice if you tell us to avoid this.

I run BasicLinux from the floppys and works fine, but is too basic and not grafic like DSL.

Onyarian