SliTaz Forum

gdesilva

Member

Registered: 2011-04-07

Posts: 419

Problems with booting a PIII machine

Hi, I am trying to see whether I could boot Slitaz on a Dell Inspiron with Pentium III, 128MB RAM and add to the insult ATI Rage Mobility P/M AGP 2x graphics card! The machine belongs to a friend and just curious to see whether Slitaz is up to the task.

This is what I have done so far;

1. Used the Slitaz 5 RC3 to boot. Boot process goes without a problem but after 'Welcome to the box' message the screen goes all funny and then goes totally black and eventually just presents with a Xterm terminal without any lxpanel or icons. Can right click and get to Openbox menu.

2. Used Slitaz 4 loram CDROM ISO - I thought given there is only 128MB RAM I would try this so that the RAM usage is kept to the minimum. Boots process appears to go to the end but the screen goes all dark with graded white patches. Not even the Xterm is presented.

3. Tried Slitaz 4 loram ISO - very similar to 2 above.

Tried Puppy 5.7.1 which boots perfectly well but the browser, Opera, is virtually unusable - very slow.

The system is currently loaded with Windows 2000.

I am hoping that Slitaz loram cdrom ISO should be the ideal and would like to know whether anyone has suggestions to get the Xserver working properly.

Many thanks.

Ceel

Administrator

Registered: 2011-04-02

Posts: 1,424

Re: Problems with booting a PIII machine

Hi,

loram should run with 128MB. Try to replace [c]autologin[/c] with [c]nomodeset screen=text[/c]

Then if you can login as root, run [c]tazx[/c]

gdesilva

Member

Registered: 2011-04-07

Posts: 419

Re: Problems with booting a PIII machine

@Ceel, I managed to boot using vga=791 option. However, my problems arfe far from over. The machine has no rj45 port and uses a pcmia interface and guess what, the special interface cable has gone missing. So i am using a USB Ethernet adaptor which has Moschip firmware and Slitaz 4 does not support this off the box. Slitaz 5 does support Moschip firmware but I could not find the loram cdrom ISO files in the repo. Would appreciate if you can let me know where i could get hold of copy of Slitaz 5 loram ISO.

Thanks

Ceel

Administrator

Registered: 2011-04-02

Posts: 1,424

Re: Problems with booting a PIII machine

Hi gdesilva,

I tried to build loram / loram-cdrom from rolling but but without success (kernel panic / unable to mount the cdrom) but this will be the object of another topic.

This morning I saw a new ISO on the mirror: http://mirror1.slitaz.org/iso/rolling/slitaz-rolling-loram.iso; I think it should work with 128MB.

gdesilva

Member

Registered: 2011-04-07

Posts: 419

Re: Problems with booting a PIII machine

@Ceel, thanks for the link. Unfortunately, I cannot test this out as this machine is not with me anymore. I was able to load TinyCore6.3 and get it going - I was rather amazed at the performance. Both TinyCore and Puppy had mcs7830 kernel modules so networking was not an issue unlike Slitaz 4. I just created swap space in the disk and was able to get pretty good response levels with Opera web browser. I would have liked to get Slitaz going as it has got the 'look and feel' of mainstream OSs but all my friend wanted was to be able to use it for web browsing and he was pretty impressed with TinyCore.

Thanks very much for your help.