iB::Topic::DSL newbie install on P166 fails

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Topic: DSL newbie install on P166 fails, installed LILO, boots OK, then fails

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dellengwyn Offline

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Posts: 15
Joined: Aug. 2006

Posted: Aug. 23 2006,10:07

OK... wow... I just managed to boot to a kind of "amber monochrome" GUI of xwindows, after having tried variations of the xsetup program and "startx." I'm not sure what I did right, but I can say that chose some of the lowest graphics resolutions. Once I figure out what the settings are, I'll post them.

Dellengwyn.

dellengwyn Offline

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Posted: Aug. 23 2006,10:51

Next update....

After rebooting to the monochrome (640x480-4 bit) desktop, a right click on the desktop and a selection of Xvesa brought me up to what I think is 640x480 256 colors on the desktop. I now have basic GUI functions on DSL on a P120 16MB laptop on a partition of 250MB with a 64MB linux swap drive.

More as it unfolds....

Dellengwyn

drnil

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Posted: Aug. 24 2006,13:57

Quote (DiSmaL @ Aug. 11 2006,12:57)

I'm a Linux newbie, trying to install DSL to experiment with on an old P166MMx with 16MB RAM and 2559MB HD. From what I've read here and on other forums, it should cope with DSL and run the GUI OK.

Having failed to get this working from within Win98 (which was on the machine) I tried to boot from the CD. This works OK, boots the kernel, detects hardware etc, but then kicks me out to runlevel 2 (see below)...

I just installed DSL on a P75 with 16MB RAM and 500MB disk, and had exactly the same problems. The first problem seems to happen because the dsl-conf script expects the directory /ramdisk to exist, while the knoppix-autoconf script, or something before that, apparently tried to be smart and skipped creating it due to low RAM. Fortunately, there is a simple solution. Boot to runlevel 2, create a script, knoppix.sh, and put it in /KNOPPIX/ . This script should do the following:

mkdir /ramdisk
chmod o+w /ramdisk

It will run before dsl-conf and creates the /ramdisk dsl-conf cries for. Incidentally, this can be used in another way for RAM-challenged computers. You could instead symlink /ramdisk to some directory on the disk, and this way be able to save RAM and have persistent storage of /opt and /tmp.

The second problem (in my case at least) with an obnoxious X I solved by removing uneeded things from .xinitrc (icon stuff, dillo, torsmo).

Speed when using X? Barely standable...

DiSmaL

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Posts: 7
Joined: Aug. 2006

Posted: Aug. 29 2006,12:52

Quote (drnil @ Aug. 24 2006,09:57)

Fortunately, there is a simple solution. Boot to runlevel 2, create a script, knoppix.sh, and put it in /KNOPPIX/ . This script should do the following:

mkdir /ramdisk
chmod o+w /ramdisk

It will run before dsl-conf and creates the /ramdisk dsl-conf cries for. Incidentally, this can be used in another way for RAM-challenged computers. You could instead symlink /ramdisk to some directory on the disk, and this way be able to save RAM and have persistent storage of /opt and /tmp.

Good job, thanks, but as a complete newbie to Linux not so simple, and the scripting is way beyond me. Any chance you could do a step-by-step how-to?