Okay, here are the specifications for the laptop in question:
133 MHz Pentium processor
40 MB RAM (and that's as high as it can go)
1.4 GB hard drive
Lucent Orinoco Silver PCMCIA card
no USB ports
Is it at all realistic to expect the core installation of Salix to run on this hardware? How difficult would it be to set up the wireless?
The other option I have is BasicLinux. It will definitely run on the system, and it might be easier for me, but the Linux kernel is older, and I can only install it if I either have some form of DOS or floppy disks, neither of which I have. And I've tried FreeDOS. The installer errors out.
I know there's Damn Small Linux, but when I tried the live CD on that system, the colors on the display were inverted. If there's a way to fix that, I would definitely install it.
Salix core on very old laptop - could it work?
Re: Salix core on very old laptop - could it work?
I'd say no way, both because of the RAM, and the small hard disk.
Have you thought of Slitaz?
Have you thought of Slitaz?
Re: Salix core on very old laptop - could it work?
I've checked out SliTaz. It seems like the only one that would work is the loram version that disables the CD-ROM drive. That would greatly limit my ability to transfer files between computers, especially if wifi doesn't work out of the box. Would any of the other flavors work?
Re: Salix core on very old laptop - could it work?
I have salix core running in a Pentium 200MMX, so the CPU is not a problem. The hard drive is not a problem either because salix core only needs about 700MBs. But the RAM might be too low. My Pentium 200MMX has 384MB... I'm not even sure the installer will start with 40 MB RAM. My guess is that if you make it through the installation, it will work. You would need to use the huge.s kernel of course and not the (default) hugesmp.s kernel. You could even take out the hard drive, do the installation on another more powerful PC and put it back in your old laptop then. Provided you can connect that old hard drive to another PC of course.
If you manage to install it, setting up wireless should be possible, but you'll have to learn how to use iwconfig etc manually. I don't think wicd-curses will run with such low RAM and even if it does it would be better if it didn't. Does this old laptop even have a wireless card?
Oh, and installing a core system from any edition iso is exactly the same.
If you manage to install it, setting up wireless should be possible, but you'll have to learn how to use iwconfig etc manually. I don't think wicd-curses will run with such low RAM and even if it does it would be better if it didn't. Does this old laptop even have a wireless card?
Oh, and installing a core system from any edition iso is exactly the same.
Re: Salix core on very old laptop - could it work?
Just 700 MB ... sorry, I didn't know it was so little. Good luck!
EDIT Regarding Slitaz, it has various options that don't always behave as expected. I'm not sure, but I think there is a way to put it on the hard disk. I only thought of it in your context because I've recently used it as a rescue disk, and it's pretty snappy. However, 40MB may well be too little for it to run in RAM as advertised.
EDIT Regarding Slitaz, it has various options that don't always behave as expected. I'm not sure, but I think there is a way to put it on the hard disk. I only thought of it in your context because I've recently used it as a rescue disk, and it's pretty snappy. However, 40MB may well be too little for it to run in RAM as advertised.
Re: Salix core on very old laptop - could it work?
I guess the only way to know for sure is to try. Thanks for the advice, gapan.
Taking the hard drive out would be more trouble than it's worth, considering the only thing I could hook it up to is a desktop that's less than two years old. If I do get it to work, I'm not really familiar with iwconfig, but I could learn. Just don't be shocked if and when I come begging for help with something. But I promise I'll eventually get it.
The laptop doesn't have built-in wireless, but I did buy a Lucent Orinoco Silver PCMCIA card for it. I heard it was a good card for Linux. The only problem I see is the network is WPA2, which I don't think the card supports. I'll probably drop the security down to WEP, since I was already thinking of doing that so I could go online with my DS. Not ideal, but I live in a somewhat rural area, so it's unlikely anything will happen.
And yeah, I figured that would be the case. The main difference between the editions is the GUI, which doesn't apply to the core system.
As for Slitaz, that'll be my next choice if Salix doesn't work. I would presume "no access to the CD-ROM drive" will cease to be an issue once it's installed to the hard drive.
If neither of those work, I'll look a little further into BasicLinux, and see if there's an alternate way to install it.
Just to clarify a bit about what I expect to do with this machine, it's mostly just IRC and light internet browsing.
Taking the hard drive out would be more trouble than it's worth, considering the only thing I could hook it up to is a desktop that's less than two years old. If I do get it to work, I'm not really familiar with iwconfig, but I could learn. Just don't be shocked if and when I come begging for help with something. But I promise I'll eventually get it.
The laptop doesn't have built-in wireless, but I did buy a Lucent Orinoco Silver PCMCIA card for it. I heard it was a good card for Linux. The only problem I see is the network is WPA2, which I don't think the card supports. I'll probably drop the security down to WEP, since I was already thinking of doing that so I could go online with my DS. Not ideal, but I live in a somewhat rural area, so it's unlikely anything will happen.
And yeah, I figured that would be the case. The main difference between the editions is the GUI, which doesn't apply to the core system.
As for Slitaz, that'll be my next choice if Salix doesn't work. I would presume "no access to the CD-ROM drive" will cease to be an issue once it's installed to the hard drive.
If neither of those work, I'll look a little further into BasicLinux, and see if there's an alternate way to install it.
Just to clarify a bit about what I expect to do with this machine, it's mostly just IRC and light internet browsing.
Re: Salix core on very old laptop - could it work?
Hmm... If you're going GUI-less, you might want to try Alpine Linux: http://alpinelinux.org/ It's designed for stuff like this.
Really though I would recommend Free/Net/OpenBSD instead. With a default CLI setup, any of those has about a third the RAM usage of a minimal Linux system.
Really though I would recommend Free/Net/OpenBSD instead. With a default CLI setup, any of those has about a third the RAM usage of a minimal Linux system.
Re: Salix core on very old laptop - could it work?
I got curious and I tried it myself in a VM.
The bad news is that the installer will not run with 40MB RAM. It simply isn't enough to load both the kernel and the installation initrd into RAM.
The good news is that if you somehow get it installed, it runs happily with the huge.s kernel. As a test, I loaded up GNU screen and opened the w3m browser in the salixos.org site, connected with irssi to freenode, mounted my host hard drive with sshfs and played an mp3 file with mpg321 from it. That still left about 20MB of RAM free. I didn't add any swap space, so that was really all. Considering that I also left all default services on (you probably don't have much use for acpid, hal, ntpd, or syslog) and connected with dhcp instead of setting static IPs and that htop itself needs about 2MB RAM you could do even better than that. Here's a shot:
That's really impressive in my opinion.
So, if you manage to move that hard drive to another PC and do the installation there, it will work fine after that.
The bad news is that the installer will not run with 40MB RAM. It simply isn't enough to load both the kernel and the installation initrd into RAM.
The good news is that if you somehow get it installed, it runs happily with the huge.s kernel. As a test, I loaded up GNU screen and opened the w3m browser in the salixos.org site, connected with irssi to freenode, mounted my host hard drive with sshfs and played an mp3 file with mpg321 from it. That still left about 20MB of RAM free. I didn't add any swap space, so that was really all. Considering that I also left all default services on (you probably don't have much use for acpid, hal, ntpd, or syslog) and connected with dhcp instead of setting static IPs and that htop itself needs about 2MB RAM you could do even better than that. Here's a shot:
That's really impressive in my opinion.
So, if you manage to move that hard drive to another PC and do the installation there, it will work fine after that.
Re: Salix core on very old laptop - could it work?
The chroot-installer I wrote could be an option as well: http://www.salixos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=3374
The downside is that it justs puts the file in the directory you tell it. It doesn't handle partitioning. As it doesn't care about the partitions and works on a filesystem level, the fstab is not setup either and no bootloader is installed. But if you handle those two steps (fstab + bootloader (e.g. lilo)) manually you should be able to get fully functional Salix installation.
The script probably runs on any linux distro that features bash (I never tested it with a different shell). So as long as you find something that boots on your hardware and get a bash shell to run on that system alongside possibly the one or other thing, it's going to work.
You could even just boot any linux distro, create the partitions, mount the partition tree somewhere and export root directory over nfs. Then you could run chroot-installer on some other machine where you mount that share.
The downside is that it justs puts the file in the directory you tell it. It doesn't handle partitioning. As it doesn't care about the partitions and works on a filesystem level, the fstab is not setup either and no bootloader is installed. But if you handle those two steps (fstab + bootloader (e.g. lilo)) manually you should be able to get fully functional Salix installation.
The script probably runs on any linux distro that features bash (I never tested it with a different shell). So as long as you find something that boots on your hardware and get a bash shell to run on that system alongside possibly the one or other thing, it's going to work.
You could even just boot any linux distro, create the partitions, mount the partition tree somewhere and export root directory over nfs. Then you could run chroot-installer on some other machine where you mount that share.
Re: Salix core on very old laptop - could it work?
So my options pretty much are:
A. Buy a hard drive enclosure, and hook up the hard drive to one of my computers via USB.
Probably the easiest option, but one that will cost me a lot of money. And it wouldn't necessarily be a good investment, since the hard drive would be virtually useless for storing things. I mean, my watch has more storage than this thing.
B. Use the chroot-installer
Hmmm, this will be quite the learning experience. Then again, I expect that of everything related to this laptop. Damn Small Linux boots fine on the system, aside from the display issue, so I could start with that. I think it uses a bash shell, but it's been a very long time since I've had anything to do with DSL. I'm reading up on how to work with nfs, how to setup fstab, and how to setup and install LILO. It might be a good idea to practice this stuff on a VM first.
C. Hook up the hard drive to my desktop
I would really prefer to avoid this option. I'm a little skittish about messing around with my desktop system while it's working, since I've had hardware problems with it before. That, and I have no idea where to find an IDE cable in my house now, since I've moved recently. Heck, I've still got to find the laptop itself.
A. Buy a hard drive enclosure, and hook up the hard drive to one of my computers via USB.
Probably the easiest option, but one that will cost me a lot of money. And it wouldn't necessarily be a good investment, since the hard drive would be virtually useless for storing things. I mean, my watch has more storage than this thing.
B. Use the chroot-installer
Hmmm, this will be quite the learning experience. Then again, I expect that of everything related to this laptop. Damn Small Linux boots fine on the system, aside from the display issue, so I could start with that. I think it uses a bash shell, but it's been a very long time since I've had anything to do with DSL. I'm reading up on how to work with nfs, how to setup fstab, and how to setup and install LILO. It might be a good idea to practice this stuff on a VM first.
C. Hook up the hard drive to my desktop
I would really prefer to avoid this option. I'm a little skittish about messing around with my desktop system while it's working, since I've had hardware problems with it before. That, and I have no idea where to find an IDE cable in my house now, since I've moved recently. Heck, I've still got to find the laptop itself.