I took rc7 for a spin (not in VM, unlike earlier), and being able to access the start menu with the windows key would be useful. Tabbing worked alright, except for being unable to check checkboxes

On a side note, spreadsheet program works well, and the HD screen made DSL look quite nice

In my research, I'm lead to believe that DSL-2024 no longer supports anything as old as an AMD K6 or 486, so I'm trying to get Legacy DSL working. It would not boot from USB (it hangs when I try to boot it from Ventoy), so I burned the ISO to a CD and I can get my machine to boot past the initial splash screen. It scans for USB devices and then it attempts to create a new authority file at /home/dsl/.Xauthority and then gives up saying so such file or directory and then fails to connect to the X server and dumps me at a terminal. I thought it might have something to do with my video driver, so I switched to an SD monitor, removed my radeon 5450 and plugged directly into onboard video. This made no difference and I'm still unable to boot into a live DSL GUI, which I've seen done on older hardware than mine on YouTube.

Can anyone tell me what's going on here? I'm running an old HP Compaq DC7700 Minitower with a Core 2 Duo E6400 and 4GB of RAM. Yes, this is much newer than the K6 or 486 I mentioned previously, but I'm just trying to make a working bootable media for DSL before I put it in my K6, and later hopefully a 486. I used this rig to burn the CD in Bunsenlabs and now I'm trying to make sure it works. Is the kernel in Legacy DSL to old for this machine, perhaps?

EDIT: Also, I have a SATA/CF card adapter and I'm experimenting with installing DSL on a CF card. However, my CF cards are only 2GB and DSL-2024 apparently requires 3.2GB. So again I'm constrained to Legacy DSL.

Hello all, I have been greatly enjoying testing out the rc7 release of DSL2024! It has ran flawlessly on all the hardware I've attempted to run it on so far, however when attempting to boot it on an Acer Aspire One AO722 netbook I have ran into an interesting graphics error that prevents booting. 

The situation is as follows: 

Netbook successfully makes it to the boot menu, no issues there, but upon choosing any of the options on the boot menu it proceeds to a nice looking loading bar followed immediately after by a graphics error resembling a rainbow version of CRT TV 'snow' and boot does not proceed. "Safe video mode","virtual box video","failsafe boot", and "text" mode all have the same results. Any suggestions? 

Some more information: 

The Acer aspire one 722 supposedly has a screen resolution of 1366x768 which -IS- an option in the "F7- console" setting of the boot menu, but selecting that resolution results in "undefined video mode number: 37f" error and a selection of other resolutions. All choices result in graphics error and no boot. This netbook will run other Linux/BSD/Haiku with no graphical errors, and it would be perfect for DSL. Namely, it boots fine on other extremely cut down Linux distributions such as Tinycore, etc, can't quite figure out why this wouldn't work with DSL. 

I have also successfully ran DSL2024.RC7 on an older Acer Aspire One ZG5 (4 years older than the AO722) and it booted and ran flawlessly. 

Is this an issue of hardware compatibility, an issue of drivers, or some form of operator error? Would love to run this as the primary operating system on this netbook. 

Any help would be much appreciated!

EDIT:
After some testing, I was able to run the netbook with various resolution modes via KolibriOS, and it will run a number of display modes which are options given by the DSL2024 boot menu with no issues, yet DSL can not do this? Is there a boot flag I need to set for things to operate properly?

After some more testing, I was able to run the exact same flash drive containing DSL2024.rc7 on a Dell laptop which also has a 1366x768 resolution with no errors, runs flawlessly, resolution number provided by Conky from within DSL. This rules out some sort of corrupted data on the flash drive. What gives? The netbook has an AMD C-60 APU, integrated graphics and processor, is that the likely culprit? I will experiment further, perhaps try a different kernel?

Hi All,

Saved a Asux Eee PC from the recycle bin. Loaded up easy with the 2024 DSL. Installed putty (terminal program) for talking to amateur radio terminal node controller (TNC).

Being simple minded, I can not get icons to go with desktop shortcuts. Can I get a hint on how do add icons to the desktop links?

Thank you,
Erico

Hey, I am a little new to this but usually I use balena etcher to burn my linux ISO's to USB however when I tried with the RC7 ISO, it gives me a warning that it has no partition table? How can I add one? Old DSL also had the same issue when I tried burning it to USB (so I ended up burning it to CD using Windows 10's built in burning and when I tried popping that in I got boot errors where it could locate the file system and it would always drop me in a emergency shell, I want to burn new DSL to CD as well but I think the same thing would happen )

What tools and processes should I use and follow in order to properly burn DSL to USB and CD on Windows 10?

While the kernel can work with a 586, it seems that init does need at least a 586 :-( The kernel cries with "Attempting to kill init" - the backtrace shows a exception regarding an illegal exception.

Tested with

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 256 -cpu 'pentium2-v1' /dev/sdd

.

The culprit: /lib/runit/runit-init uses CMOV (2 times in the whole binary), and this is supported only on Pentium Pro onwards.

Would it be possible to recompile the binaries with march=586 (or pentium)? Then I could probably run it on an IBM Thinkpad 760 (P1-133 and 64 MB RAM - for the RAM see the other thread) :-)

Btw, even the K6... K6-3 are 586 class CPUs.

The Initrd of an installed version as grown to compressed 40 MB. This means that it needs at least 256 MB RAM (on 128 MB, it decompresses but chrashes later)

So: Is there a method to archive a smaller initrd?

The main contents:
* 7 MB intel microcode (I think these get purged early, so no problem)
* 32 MB "main" initrd", which gets decompressed to 76 MB

the main initrd:
Most in lib
* 12 MB firmware
* 14 MB lib
* 49 MB modules

Most of the firmware is for network stuff. Perhaps it is useful to ask whether it should be used for PXE boot - because if not this is not needed ;-)

Lib: Crypto is about 5 MB. Only needed for crypted devices. (and why libntfs?)

modules:
1.1 M crypto - only needed for cryptsetup and perhaps enforcing secure boot
39 MB drivers
16 MB net - only needed for PXE-boot
1,5 MB infiniband - I think nobody starts this from infiniband^^
8 MB scsi, ok, needed. Exceptions:
1 MB lpfc - "Emulex LightPulse Fibre Channel" - is not exactly used that often for boot
0,9 MB qla2xxx - "QLogic Fibre Channel HBA Driver" - is not exactly used that often for boot
0,5 MB bfa - "QLogic BR-series Fibre Channel" - is not exactly used that often for boot

5.3 MB fs - 1.2 MB nfs, only needed for pxeboot
1.5 MB net - only needed for pxeboot

so about 38 MB could be saved.

I want ahead. this made about 37 MB initrd, which gets compressed to 14 MB.

Ok now I got more aggressive and killed more (iscsi, ntfs-3g, fuse, btrfs/f2fs/jfx/xfs, sound) - 31/11 MB.

This did not work, because busybox has an hard dependency to libcrypto. But after adding that back (36/13,7 MB) I got it to work with 128 MB RAM! The whole system needs, regarding the desktop, 52 MB RAM + 7 MB swap.

This works even with only 96 MB. Even with 80 (getting an error not having an suitable RAM region for KASL, but started to desktop). The absolute minimum is 79 MB - Linux reports 63 MB then, the rest (16 MB) got eaten by the kernel.
But my target machine has even less RAM - 64 MB. 15 MB still missing.


Additionally, I think the kernel can use squashfs as initrd, so there is no decompression needed.

Problem: The kernel can not use squashfs as initramfs...

Next try: xz. Important: use --check=crc32, else the kernel can not work with it.

-6 made a 9.9 MB image, but needs too much memory for decompress.
-2 made a 11,4 MB image, but still 79 MB RAM is needed.

No compression of the initrd let grub bark out at a OOM - so no help here as well.

Ok, now I got way more aggressive and delete lots of stuff (forgotten btrfs binary, lots of modules)

-> 29,6 / 11,6 MB

The new RAM limit: 70 MB. Ok, 6 MB to go.

Ok, more killing. I tried to leave most of usb, scsi, ide, pcmcia intact.
Also removed the bin versions of the modules-files.
Additionally, somehow the hard link to busybox between bin and sbin got broken, fixed it with a

while [ true ]; do rdfind -makehardlinks true . ; done

(Type Ctrl+C when no dupplicates are found anymore)

-> 26,8/10,6 MB
The new RAM limit: 66 MB. Only 2 to go!

Tried upx on libcrypto.so.3, libext2fs.so.2.4 and libzstd.so.1.5.4 -> but not good as it kills the exports.

Used it on every binary but the busybox (I'm afraid that this hurts the perfomance too much), killed a forgotten ntfs-3g....

-> 25,6 / 10,5 MB

And it BOOTED with 64 MB!

Edit: You can download the last version of the initrd on
https://mifritscher.de/austausch/dsl/2024-rc6/initrd7 and
https://mifritscher.de/austausch/dsl/202...initrd7.gz .

And a Screenshot:
https://mifritscher.de/austausch/dsl/202...enshot.png

Added German, French, Spanish, Portuguese language support to the "low ram" faster boot startup option
Fixed Mouse Config and Edit Config Files errors in the Control Center
Enabled Root term window option in file manager

Hi dear John,

frugal install - no persistance - 1 go RAM - cpu 1467 mhz - packard bell bv easynote mz35

In Control Center, for me, 2 buttons don't work.

Hardware tab / "Mouse config" option :
nothing happens.

System tab / "Edit Config Files" option :
nothing happens too.

I wish the best for you.

Happy to read you nearly.

Best regards.

Wish to copy Xmms input plugins that  should be have been included: Flac, Musepack, Wavpack and Monkey's Audio to usr/lib/xmms/input. Mod plugin included when most users today don't know what a Mod format is.

Using Zzz fm, under File, Root window, nothng happens. Some days a new window would popup, not now.

How can I copy the files as Root to above directory?

Is there a method to determine either in the install or on CD what the version number of DSL is? Have cd from about June 2024 but did not notice any version number on it.