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Topic: DSL in a very old laptop. Solutions, Problems and solutions

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Onyarian

Group: Members
Posts: 151
Joined: April 2005

Posted: Dec. 05 2005,17:40

Hi,

My experience with an very old laptop and my solutions

I have an Mitac 4023 (486, DX66, 12Mb RAM, Non colour screen, HD 1.6Gb, Pcmcia, floppy)
I have made a DSL 2.0 HD instalation, with 460 Mb swap, trought my desktop PC.

DSL runs in graphical form OK. But there are a few problems that I have resolved in the next form:

-Fluxbox in the minimal form but with dockapp, or now better with Jwm

-The Xwindow system is Vesa, but the screen have only 4bits. So I have problems with some applications like Dillo. The error message is: "Gdk-WARNING**: Visual type-static color depth=4, image bpp=4, lsb first is not supported by GdkRGB. Please submit a bug report with the above values to bugzilla.gnome.org"

-The list of aplications that don't work for this reason are:
-Rox
-Dillo
-Sylpheed
-Firefox
-Opera
-xzgv
-SQLite book
-xmms
-FLWriter

-But others application that works are:
-Abiword (slow but OK)
-Ted (very good)
-Emelfm (very good)
-Beaver (very good)
-xpaint (good)
-Siag (good)
-Pdf viewer
-MSDoc viewer
-XCalc
-Calendar
-PIM
-GTKFind

-My problem was that with this aplications I can't surf the web and see my e-mail with my pcmcia modem 3Com. And the Solution was to find BrowseX (http://www.browsex.com)

This is a Web browser with a mail client on it. Is an Tcl-Tkhtml aplication and runs good, only need 50 sec. to come up in this slow laptop. Is an Open source app. Comes as a 5Mb .gz archive, and decompressed is a 9 Mb app. The source files are on it, because this 9Mb archive is an executable zip archive, so if you rename it with the zip extension, you can see all the source files.

I'm writing this thread with Beaver, inserting it and surfing the DSL web page with BrowseX, and all this thinks with an old laptop and DSL.

Now, I have DSL installed in my old desktop PC as frugal (486 - 100 - 96 Ram - 5Gb HD), on my 512 Mb USB Pendrive DSL as Tripleboot, and in this laptop DSL as HD instalation (486 - 66 - 12 Ram -1.6Gb HD)

Lot of Thanks to the DSL Team, your work is incredible!.

Onyarian.

skaos

Group: Members
Posts: 430
Joined: April 2004

Posted: Dec. 06 2005,12:50

If your laptop supports 8-bit greyscale, I think that you can install the full XFree myDSL package. I suggest that you google to find the graphics chipset and then find out if it supported in XFree 4.3.x. If it's not, then it may work with XFree 3.3.6.

The reason the Xvesa X-server only works with 4-bit is that Xvesa requires a vesa 2.0 compliant card and that your card probably is 1.x. You can list the vesa modes your card supports with this command: Xvesa -listmodes

Onyarian

Group: Members
Posts: 151
Joined: April 2005

Posted: Dec. 06 2005,21:14

Thanks,

I will tray it, and tell you how it goes!!

Onyarian.

Nny
Unregistered

Posted: Mar. 14 2006,07:59

hmm under Xvesa -listmodes, the last option is "320x200x8 PsuedoColor, where/ how do i tell Xvesa to use this mode?

Nny
Unregistered

Posted: Mar. 14 2006,08:18

Kind of late, will register tomorrow, but I also have a mitac 4023, and your solution seems appropiate, although i think my screen is color... I'll continue to post my results!!

DSL reminds me why I am a linux user... i mean, it's a 486, and it acts about as fast as other distros i have seen.. amazing

4 replies since Dec. 05 2005,17:40

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