Hello I managed to get a laptop for only £20 ^ ^ inc p+p it has the folllowing specs: (which are relevant in this discussion) p2 266mhz 32mb EDO ram one USB port 4gb hard disk pcmic Ethernet card with linux drivers in kernel floppy drive so I installed DOS 6.2 on it and windows 3.11 which behaved well but are unsuited for web browsing and word processing. I then attempted to install Damm small linux which is not working too well, this is what I did: made usb boot floppy made DSL embed usb boot disk used the floppy to boot the usb disk The result is a system which although works is very very slow and bits of it keep crashing. My system should be able to run dsl fine as it has double the required ram. Any help with getting this usable or another low ram usage distro?
Does the laptop have a panel you can open underneath for a memory upgrade? If it does, I have a 64Mb stick of SDRAM SODIMM you can have for the price of postage.
There should be a low ram boot option have you tried that. I ran a customised DSL from a hard disk on a P1 tosh lappy and it seemed to work (slowly) fine. But i barley used DSL mostly i used it as an X-terminal for my server.
well I am now posting from said laptop after doing a hd install. The problem with it previously I think was the use of the usb disc sapping reasources and having to swap out of a very slow usb 1.1 disc can't be fun. Whatever the problem was this system is now usable although aplications like firefox are still too much of a memory hog to be used. If the offer on the ram is still extended I would take you up on your offer lanW, with thanks (I will pm you latter tonight). DSL rearly is quite amazing, unless I try and run one of the more bloated aplications it feels far faster than any of my linux or windows machines. I just need to setup dos on a sperate partition and use grub to duel boot now (for Qbasic (needed by college) and the old dos games, unless of course there is a dos emulator that i can run inside linux?
Yeah i found the firefox mostly unusable tended to stick with what ever the other one that was installed by default.
Well I managed to install dos emu and it works with QBasic so that's one application I have to use taken care of.. (still need to test to see if the output ports still work but they should) http://dosemu.sourceforge.net/stable/ ^rocks (note I had to hack it a bit to get it working... it didn't run its installer properly so I just copied all the files where they had to go... not sure how your meant to install applications but I just copied them into its hidden folder thing) (This may not be ideal for battery usage as it uses all available CPU although the rest of the system is not locked - its a bit like running F@H) Just need to get the sound working (which looks like a nightmare - I can't even follow what other people have done its so complicated) also need to figure out some linux pic programming software/programmer but that shouldn't be too hard - although my collage has taught me a different assembler syntax to the accepted norm
I presume it was the binaries you downloaded? In that case yeah putting the files in the correct place should be enough, you may need a link to your local bin folder for it as well. Sound: Check if the drivers are compiled either modularly or directly into the kernel. Install the alsa package, run alsaconfig as root. If that doesn't work then yeah you've probably got a nightmare on your hands Its all good fun though.
