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Hi all,
I want to thank in advance anyone that chooses to giving a windows guy a hand, Thanks!
Here is the situation. Our company is moving to thin client hardware for each of our call centers, but the purchase of the volume of needed new hardware is a slow process that is proceding as finances allow. In the mean time we are wanting an alturnitve to windows on our aged hardware. We have chosen to use Slitaz on our Dell GX240. The computers all have 1GB of ram and will be using existing hard drives. The problem I am running into is that the bios (Flashed to the latest version "A05") does not allow a boot to USB. I have created the bootable DVD, and added aN IDE DVD ROM to the machine. The DVD boots and I get the Slitaz splash screen and a ram count, but then nothing, it just sits there on the "Boot baby, boot" splash screen.
I need to get this installed and working so that I can image it and begin getting our computers up and running with the Citrix client,
Does anyone have a detailed suggestion on what I need to do to get this running?
Again thanks for any help you can offer in advance
Rat
@Ratmeat,not sure what could be the problem but I am running Slitaz Cooking (20110602) (and also successfully ran Slitaz 3.0 previously) on a Dell GX240 (768Mb RAM and DVD ROM A05 Bios). In case you have not tried it already, perhaps worthwhile creating a new boot disk?
I do not get any ram count after the Slitaz splash screen - in my case, the splash screen waits for any boot commands and after a few seconds times out and boots Slitaz.
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Also you wrote it to a DVD rather than a CD? Oo
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Trixar,
Yes, I found the image I downloaded was 1.2Gb. That may be why its not booting, corrupt image. I will download again and make a new boot disk.
Thanks for the feedback
Rat
There is two type of discs you can download. One with just packages on it (and 1GB+) and the 30MB or so ISOs for Stable (SliTaz 3) or Cooking. If it's downloading bigger than 32MB or so, then you have a bad iso or your downloading the packages disc.
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Ok all, Im still struggleing with this install to HD. I have formated the drive, mad it bootable and mounted it before install. At this point I am getting an Er"ror loading operating system" Message. I have no idea what the problem is. To the best of my knowledge, the hardware is functional and over the requirment.
Advice???
Thanks again,
Rat
Wow, sorry about the typos 
If I were you, I would do the following:
- download and burn to a CD the "cooking iso" (around 30MB),
- reboot the computer with this fresh and new CD in the drive.
=> the system should boot and start a slitaz session. Everything is in RAM at this point. You can play with it.
If you are happy with this LIVE session, you can install slitaz to your HD:
- boot the computer with the fresh and new CD in the drive.
- once slitaz is here, you can login as:
* username: root
* pwd: root
- then: application -> system_tools -> slitaz installer
- and answer the questions displayed on the screen.
It may worth reading the doc. For example: http://doc.slitaz.org/en:handbook:installation
Happy slitaz.
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Hi Ratmeat, I'm in a similar position to you - being a Windows systems engineer but trying (largely unsuccesfully so far) to get my head round Linux.
I had to partition my drive before installing Slitaz: I don't recall exactly what happened when I didn't do this (it was a few weeks ago and before Christmas, when I had more brain cells) but I think the installation looked like it worked but didn't.
Boot the live CD then from the "start" menu, the go to system tools then GParted. This is the partition manager. Hopefully it will look vaguely familiar to you.
I made three partitions: a "primary" partition for the boot, of 400meg; a "home" partition for user data of 500meg; and a "swap" partition for the memory swap file of 100meg. All these partition types are selectable from a drop-down menu (it's not quite the same as windows, where you just make a bunch of partitions and then assign swap and data to them later, Linux seems to need the partition type setting up front).
Slitaz then installed correctly by following the menus as described in totoetsasoeur's post.
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@ratmeat
Install the grub bootloader to MasterBootRecord.
"Error loading operating system" means a windows bootloader is still on the MBR.
Did you format the slitaz install partition to ext3 filesystem?
Don't use fat32 or ntfs filesystem.
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@Jason First Rule of Linux: Everybody starts as a beginner.
Being a Windows Expert doesn't really make the processes of learning to use Linux any easier. In fact, it makes it a little harder because nothing you know in Windows really translate over into Linux. It was that very reason that I gave up on Linux the first time I tried it. Then when Windows pissed me off enough, I chose to format Windows off the drive and dive in to Linux completely. I was also without an internet connection, but using my wit and some creative googling off my mobile phone I found a way online. That was four years ago and I haven't looked back.
Anyway... back on topic. You don't really need all those partitions. You can have your home and boot directories on the same partition, while creating a small swap partition. I do recommend having atleast 350MB of swap for SliTaz. It's like the swap file on Windows - try to keep it about 1,5 times your RAM (I have about 256MB, so mine is around 350MB). SliTaz uses swap less, but it's still a good idea to make sure you have between 350-500MB open for when you need it. 100MB is WAY too little. Also make sure you format the swap partition as swap and the home/boot partition as ext3 otherwise SliTaz will NOT work. Technically it can work without the swap partition because it should be made during the install process, but I've never tried it like that (I always made them manually).
Also about the partition sizes. You'll need more space for the Linux partition, especially if you wish to install stuff. 300MB is NOT enough considering SliTaz's base install takes about 160MB of HDD space. My SliTaz install with everything I want is about 1,8GB itself and that includes the packages to compile stuff and run XFCE. Maybe the issues you're having is caused by the sizes of the partitions your creating. Combine the home/boot partition and put aside atleast 1,6GB for them. Then put aside atleast 400MB for the swap. This way your SliTaz install will use about 2GB.
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Windows != Linux, ain't that the truth. I love Linux...I just don't understand it.
I didn't know home and boot could be the same partition. If you don't have a home partition, will SliTaz just put the home directory on the primary partition?
As for the swap file...350meg would be nice, but my system is slightly odd in that it is a micro-ITX with a 1gig IDE solid state disk-on-chip, and 1gig of RAM (in a custom 15x15x4cm box). So I have lots of memory but very little drive space. I use it as an instant-on internet machine in the kitchen, with nothing else installed, so I don't need lots of install space.
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Doing the math with my home directory being 1.7GB and the total used space is about 2.60GB for my system. Yeah, that means SliTaz takes up about 900MB of space. This means you could probably save on space and make 200MB swap while leaving 800MB for disk space. You'll then be able to install say Firefox, Abiword, Gnumeric, Python, TCL and Perl, Geany (uninstall beaver), XArchive, Gimp, Claws-mail, Pidgin, Xchat, gFTP, Sakura (as a replacement for xterm - don't remove xterm), VLC, the proper ssh client, and Wine and still only use about 450MB for everything. Using something like bleachbit (which I'm yet to upload to my site) you'd be able to get rid of some other junk you'll probably never use (like locale's other than en or en_US). You can probably reduce it even more by getting rid of the other programs like asunder and that sound editing program that you'll never use.
It amazes me how much you can squeeze into a SliTaz install sometimes >.>
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Yeah. I'm only scratching the surface learning Linux, but SliTaz just seems amazing. I have another machine running Ubuntu but it is slow and bloated compared to XP on the same machine.
I love how lean SliTaz is - it feels to me like the Amiga would have been if Commodore hadn't gone under.
Regarding your list of programs, Trixar, would it be worth it to make a package with all of those in it as part of the online package repository - kind of like Apple's "starter app pack" for the iPad. Something to get complete newbies going.
I'd love to see SliTaz more widely known and used - when trying to find a distro for this micro machine of mine I think I tried around ten linux flavours; damn-small-linux, tiny-core-linux, puppy, ubuntu, crunch-bang, lubuntu, unity...and others I forget. SliTaz was the only one that really worked on my hardware, and looked great. I hope it doesn't fizzle out, and I hope to become more involved in this community as I learn.
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I actually left SliTaz for a while because I got pissed off with how BAD the rolling version is. I tried all the ones you mentioned and then some. I even tried to build up Ubuntu and Mandriva from the ground up. I failed, but it's probably a good thing. I played with Puppy the longest, but in the end it just wasn't fitting in with what I wanted.
I also learned that SliTaz isn't the only distro with issues. Unity for example is having similar issues to SliTaz with getting their distro to work properly. They also recommend using an older edition like we recommend using SliTaz 3 for now.
In the end I came back to SliTaz. It's just a better fit even with all it's faults. In the end it's up to the community of a distro to fix it I guess rather than trying to find something better.
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Different subject, and can't find where to post this. Trixar: is it possible to change my username? There's another "Jason" with the same exact username on the forums and I prefer to be unique...
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I can only really see one way to do it. Go to http://forum.slitaz.org/profile/jason and click the edit tab. Then enter what you want in First Name, then scroll down and click Update Profile. Now go to where it says Display Name As and click on the pull down menu and select the name you want.
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Excellent, thanks.
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