Hello,

I want to put DSL on an old laptop with 64MB of RAM. All I get after installation is a Linux prompt, and I don't know anything about linux commands. I need a GUI and like KDE4 (Beta).

Can I do that? If so, how? Is there something better to do?

Many thanks in advance.

Dwight Randall

You won't get KDE of any description on a machine with 64M!

DSL comes with its own GUI, you must've installed it incorrectly or for some reason it's not booting into it - maybe due to graphics adaptor not being set-up correctly.

What happens if you type startx then hit enter at the command prompt?

Probably if X runs, chances are KDE 4.0 would also run..or not, I don't know. But it would be damn slow if it would. And (note the KDE site: "don't call it KDE 4 because it's not that - it's KDE 4.0, and even 4.1 is not the same as 'KDE4'") even if it worked..don't get it yet. I tried it out of curiosity too, to see what they had changed; got disappointed with the menu layout and crashing. All sorts of problems, that were warned about though: it's still not usable for actually working in.

People say that maybe the 4.1 version is more usable - faster, more stable. Don't know and probably won't try too soon either..and the performance in the current version? If a Gnome desktop with all the 3d bells and whistles runs ten times faster than KDE 4.0 stripped from all it's glory, it surely doesn't sound good. Even if it didn't crash once in a while.

Going back to kde 3.x of a couple of years ago, 96 M was just about sufficient to get it working, but...

- you'd have to have had a lot of patience

- you probably wouldn't have managed to run a program of any size under it

given that was the situation with 3.x/96M (& Gnome was hardly any better) your chances of achieving anything useful would be vanishingly small with 64M & kde 4.x.

And, as commented earlier, the 4.0x series aren't really intended for end user usage - the earliest one intended for that will be 4.1 (June!). And, I'm not even sure if 4.1 will be good enough from my point of view - I might be waiting for 4.15 or something. And remember I'm someone who really wants it, although I'm not prepared to put up with the level of gross instability that I saw in 4.02 in order to get it.

So while it is pretty, you can't get it and it probably wouldn't work if you could. So, you are probably best advised to debug what you've got.

I'm actually a pretty big fan of the JWM (Joe's Window Manager) GUI that comes with DSL, and you can switch to Fluxbox if you don't like how JWM works.

When I first tried Damn Small Linux, I had a lot of problems because what was on my screen didn't seem to be anything like how it was described in the FAQs. Then I discovered that I hadn't installed DSL at all. I had accidentally installed DSL-N (DSL-Not, as in, "Not DSL").

Once I downloaded the correct DSL ISO, it worked beautifully for me on my OLD Pentium II, and I'm very much a Linux newbie. In fact, it's the ONLY distro I've been able to get to boot on that old computer.

So, I suggest downloading a fresh ISO, burning it to a CD and booting from that. Maybe the ISO you downloaded was corrupted?

Also, are you remembering to hit "Enter" at the boot prompt? It took me a little while at first to realize you have to hit "Enter" to get the process going.

Hi,
I want to complete my DSL-N ( why N, because it is 2.6 kernel, it recognizes the usb automatically), my miniPc has only usb-mouse and usbkeyboard, I couldn't isnstall DSL.

Is there a possibility to install apt-get to complete with debian repository ?

thanks for help
bela

You can add apt and synaptic to DSL, so I presume the same is true of DSL-N.