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Puppy seems to be the only distro that runs properly on this laptop.
Three distros I've tried to boot on this laptop:
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
OpenSUSE Leap
LinuxBBQ Bork!
These boot on this laptop, but the only issue I have is when dmesg shows up, it always hangs at "Unpacking initramfs . . . " and I can't do anything about it except for rebooting.
The hardware specs:
Dell Laditude D531
AMD Turion-64 X2
1 GB RAM
ATI Radeon graphics
________
I have tried SliTaz Stable on it--it boots and starts X--but it glitches out eventually--blinking the screen fast enough to give me a seizure--I think it's because of the crappy GPU I have that nothing except Windows XP and Puppy Linux supports.
Please show me a workaround for the hanging initramfs issue so I can get my favorite distro--LinuxBBQ--working.
If neither of those, then screwed (for most distros). Debian works for me for most things. But there's extra effort for older things with linux-image-486, even though it might be a 64 bit arch.
I have the sempron version on an e-machine and debian works fine. Just stick with the radeon GPU drivers. There are no proprietary ones that work past kernel 3.4.x. And nomodeset probably wont help unless the last resort is framebuffer graphics ONLY. Usable to a limited degree, but little to no accelerations. You might also try the smaller wm's like IceWM, Jwm, since you only have 1GB ram. I upped my sempron to 2GB 800MHz ram(via goodwill tech store), and what a difference that made since it had 1GB 533MHz ram and the GPU uses shared ram (SHM).
Looks normal-ish enough to me. 64 bit, and not too ancient. I did have to slap a debian wheezy kernel on a debian jessie install for my older desktop for it to boot. Not sure why outside of doing a 32 bit install thinking it was older than it is. It's my rarely turned on print server since it has a parallel port.
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