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Topic: Installing on a very, very old laptop...< Next Oldest | Next Newest >
The_Pirate Offline





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Posted: Mar. 07 2006,19:31 QUOTE
Hi -
I have a ancient laptop: A ICL ErgoLite S4/33c. The Thing.
It has run a MuLinux for a while, but Mu is hopelessly outdated. I would like to have DSL running.

Thing is, Thing only has a diskette drive. I ripped the harddisk out, installed DSL on it in another machine... and it didn't work.

Problem is, Thing only has a i486 SX processor (no builtin math coprocessor) - and DSL needs a DX. Kernel_panic.

Does one of the older DSL's have a kernel that accepts a SX, please?
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cbagger01 Offline





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Posted: Mar. 08 2006,17:37 QUOTE
Get DSL version 0.5.3.1

You still need a decent amount of RAM, though.

16MB is a good starting point.
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The_Pirate Offline





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Posted: Mar. 09 2006,12:22 QUOTE
Too bad - 12 Megs is the max for the Thing. :(

With MuLinux, it runs pretty smooth, even with X.

Perhaps i should stick to Mu. But it would be nicer with a newer Linux. And i don't really want to do a hardware update.

It has certain geek value to throw the Thing on the table at meetings, when everybody else comes dragging their multi-GHz machines, limping and whimpering with a XP... (evil laughter) ...i just need to find a way to make the Thing give a faint blue glow, then it's perfect!
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cbagger01 Offline





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Posted: Mar. 12 2006,05:27 QUOTE
You can get DSL up and running in text mode with 12MB of RAM if you specify certain cheatcodes.  They all might not work for older versions of DSL, but you can try typing:

Code Sample
dsl 1 vga=normal atapicd noideraid nosound noapic noacpi acpi=off noscsi noapm nousb nopcmcia nofirewire noagp nomce


at the boot prompt.  For very old versions, substitute the word  "dsl" with the word "knoppix"
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skaos Offline





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Posted: Mar. 13 2006,15:15 QUOTE
You could also take a look at http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/baslinux/.
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7 replies since Mar. 07 2006,19:31 < Next Oldest | Next Newest >

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