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Damn Small Linux on old sony thin&light

post #1 of 10
2/16/06 at 4:11pm
Thread Starter 
i aquired an old sony laptop from a friend and due to its limited specs i wanted to put DSL on it. it was designed for Win98, but doesnt handle it very well. it has a celeron processor (don't know the speed) and 128 MB of RAM. it does NOT have a built in CD or floppy drives. it only has 1 USB port. It does have a external cd drive that hooks up through the PC card slot. the bios does not support booting form USB, so I burned the DSL iso to a CD, and put it in the CD drive. It starts booting, and recognizes some devices, but when it tries to mount the filesystem, it says that it cannot find the knoppix filesystem and tosses me to a "very limited" shell. i was thinking that this was because it doesn't do well trying to read from the pcmcia in the limited bootup environment (linux being SO well with pc card slots). what can i do?
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post #2 of 10
2/16/06 at 4:14pm
Heh unfortunatly DSL is not one of my strong suits, I probably would have to be there to help you, sorry.

Seablade
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post #3 of 10
2/16/06 at 6:39pm
hmm.... just a suggestion, try another distro. something with enlightenment, fluxbox, or xfce as a desktop so that it runs fine. DSL still uses 2.4 kernel among some older hardware support methods, so maybe if you get some newer software it will work better.
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post #4 of 10
2/16/06 at 10:26pm
Thread Starter 
xubuntu? can i choose what parts to install, because with the limited resources i would still like to choose as few things as possible to be running, or even taking up space on the only 5.8 gig hard drive.
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post #5 of 10
2/16/06 at 11:48pm
I've put Xubuntu on a Presario 1020 with 120Mhz/48Mb/1.08Gb, and while space was tight, it worked all right. You could start with a server install, and then add packages you think you'll need. You would avoid some bloat that way, although a Xubuntu installation never struck me as very bloated.

By the way, this sounds like your problem. Does that help at all?
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post #6 of 10
2/17/06 at 1:09am
Quote:
Originally Posted by tlo
xubuntu? can i choose what parts to install, because with the limited resources i would still like to choose as few things as possible to be running, or even taking up space on the only 5.8 gig hard drive.

xubuntu setup.

1 - install server (just core packages)
2 - install xubuntu-desktop

xubuntu-desktop includes some basics apps and xfce files. and firefox 1.0.7

3 - install xscreensaver and add it to the bootscript (manually!)
4 - install gnome-volume-manager to and automout to have automounting



thats pretty much it. now you're ready to just install your own software and you should be good. its good practice to keep 1 app per task. that is, don't install gnomebaker, k3b and nero since they all do the same thing, install just one!
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post #7 of 10
2/20/06 at 8:08pm
Thread Starter 
does xubuntu run very fast on your old cumputer? because the reason i want to go with dsl is that i want a fast system. i will be doing compiling, net, etc on it and i don't have very much patience dealing with a slow OS
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post #8 of 10
2/20/06 at 8:37pm
I have xdsl running on my xbox and it's friggin' fast. Much faster than gentoox. I'd spend some time and try and work through the issues before I jump into another lightweight distro.
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post #9 of 10
2/20/06 at 8:59pm
dsl has fluxbox


try another cd maybe
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post #10 of 10
2/20/06 at 10:21pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by bigtrouble77
I have xdsl running on my xbox and it's friggin' fast. Much faster than gentoox. I'd spend some time and try and work through the issues before I jump into another lightweight distro.
yeah they are pretty buggy. i might try that out on my xbox.
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