dsl on old school compaq 1220 laptop
 

Hi,

First experiences with dsl, pretty damn cool for 50 megs, anyway tried it on toshiba qosmio f10 ran pretty good. One question, how come it doesn't detect partitions on the hdd and try to mount them?

Then tried it on Compaq 1220 laptop, set the resolution to 800x600
and tried to boot. I can see the screen but it is in a horrible halographic picture which is very hard to see, but I can tell it is the right screen. The picture is not very good to begin with as the graphics are only 128 bit and the screen can only support 800x600.

This box is very low end it has a whole 32 megs ram and a whopping 2.1 gb hdd. I doesn't even have a nic. Actually trying to find a nic for this box cause the whole floppy thing is not that practical.

Should I be using dsl? And what am I doing wrong to not be able see the screen?

Is the screen like, green and white or something?
Try inserting the dsl disk and type in dsl xsetup. on the first one, select the bottom option.
Sorry if this was too generic. your problem sounds like the one i was having.

I have DS Linux running on a simular laptop.
Your problem is probably that old laptops need frame buffering for any display.

This should work for most old laptops:

1. Boot your CD with fb800x600.

2. During the boot process it will give you the choice to use either a vesa or an fb driver. With most old laptops you'll need the fb driver (second option with DS Linux), selecting this one should fix your graphical problems.

If it's for a HD install, boot like this:
install fb800x600 and pick the fb driver as well.

Hi, Thank you very much for your post as it did work. I would like to use this machine for office work, the occasional internet browse and to share files to a windows machine.

I would like to install it to the hardrive and possibly install some sort of office software even if it was just a word processor. I assume openoffice.org would not run on such a machine, I don't care how slow it would be though Or maybe just abiword? It would have to support ms word crap.

Also, what would be a good nic to get for this box? It only has to be 10 mbits/s.

Word processor? Just use ted. But you have to save all your word documents as rich text format, not word document (.rtf, not .doc)
Hope that helped.

Ok I thought that when you do a frugal install to your hdd(no removable)it would stop accessing the disc, so that you could use the drive to burn and such?

Do I have to do a normal install and when I do how do I:

Change the size of the directories so that my root is not just 2.9 MB and so my /home is bigger than 800 MB.

Also when I do this kind of install do the one click install and compile disappear? break or not work?

Would a Surecom EP-427X 16bit 10/100m Network PCMCIA Adapter be supported with dslinux? do they have a hardware list?

I believe this old compaq has a 16bit isa type pcmcia, right? Anyone know of any sure fire cards?

Thanks very much, frick dsl is cool