bulldozer
Group: Members
Posts: 8
Joined: Mar. 2008 |
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Posted: April 10 2008,17:13 |
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I just got DSL up and running on a Toshiba Libretto 70ct. One of the scientists here where I work as a support tech asked me what he could do with it. It originally had Win95 and somehow managed to run Office 2000 with 120MHz (underclocked Pentium MMX 160MHz), 16MB RAM, and a 6" LCD. No CD-ROM but he did provide me with a PCMCIA floppy.
I told him I could install Linux so that it would have a modern OS and modern browsers for surfing the internet. It would be better than Win95! So I set out on my quest. In retrospect it was alot easier than it seemed, but I had alot of trial and error. After reading a few guides on HDD installs without a CDROM I removed the HDD and attached it to an Ubuntu 7.10 machine I use daily and formatted it with a 64MB partition and one large partition for the rest. I copied the KNOPPIX folder contents from the ISO to the small partition and created a boot floppy. Once I put the HDD back in the Libretto and started booting off the floppy I thought I was home free. But alas, I was not.
Segmentation Fault! Around the time of creating the RAMDISK the system would panic, I saw kwapd and cp -r in the errors. I had no idea what to do. I almost gave up and left the Libretto sitting on my desk. During this time I was trying to post to this forum but my account had not been activated. I didn't give up, I just dove deeper into the wiki and there it was under boot option cheat codes: mem=xxM I added that to the boot options and after a few minutes, JWM with a nice Dillo window to greet me.
After that it has been all fun with no real problems. Dillo works great, but Firefox took 5 minutes to load cause it filled up what remained of the 16MB of RAM and started the kernel swapping like a madman. Another hurdle, Dillo didn't display everything correctly, I decided my test for a browser would be logging into my bank and checking my transaction history. Dillo wouldn't work with the javascript crap my bank used. Another week or so went by, then I remembered Opera, it seemed like a relic from the past in my mind, but I went into myDSL, installed Opera and it worked, slowly, but usably for the occasional non-DIllo working websites it would be used for. I replaced Firefox in the tray with an Opera link and not the little Libretto is usable!
I'd like to thank everyone that works on DSL for putting together a distro that, while not made for older hardware, works really well because of the size constraints you have challenged yourself with. My next task is to get a wireless card operating on this notebook to replace the PC card ethernet to cut the final cord and make this thing fully portable.
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