TCL on old laptop - normal methods thwart me

[EddieRay]

I'm trying to get TCL installed on an old laptop (hard drive) and the normal methods don't work booting from CD - graphics are munged.  The CD boots fine in text mode tho'.  I have no network adapters (without using PCMCIA) so I have to install with a CD but I can use a pen-drive to copy files.  So, I'm trying to boot/install and get one of the other display extensions (like Xfbdev or Xorg) working, however, since I have no Xvesa to work with, I can't do what all of the walkthrus tell me to do since they all inevitably end up saying something like "use the "ab" or the graphical AppBrowser to install extension blah-blah"... which doesn't work in text mode.  I haven't been able to find any reference that tells me how to install extensions "manually" by some other means.

Can anyone offer any suggestions on how I can get going?

[EddieRay]

Also note that I'm pretty familiar with Linux but I'm a newb with TCL in particular.

[Guy]

http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:install_apps

http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:start

[curaga]

http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:package_management_cheat_sheet

ab does work in text mode, I think you meant "without network" tce-load is the engine. If following the official install guide, you'd only need to download these:
cfdisk.tcz, ncurses.tcz, ncurses-common.tcz, grub-0.97-splash.tcz

[gerald_clark]

Have you tried <CTL><ALT><Backspace> at the munged graphics?
That should get you to a $ prompt where you can run xsetup.

[EddieRay]

The graphics mode doesn't help... it's just that the crappy NeoMagic chip doesn't support the VESA spec properly (I'm guessing).  When I hit CTRL-ALT-backspace it quits the Xserver but then the text mode screen is screwed.

[EddieRay]

Okay... I boot from CD with "tinycore text vga=788" (I see a splash in the upper left corner, and then text mode is smaller than normal DOS boot 80x25)... then I do a "tce-load -i /mnt/hda1/tce/optional/Xfbdev.tcz" and then "xsetup" (which doesn't do anything except choose a mouse type)... then VOILA!  I have a working X screen!  Now to see about getting GRUB to work so I can boot from HDA...

[EddieRay]

Okay... booting from HDA now.

Next hurdle... I put Xfbdev.tcz into /tce/optional... but it doesn't load at boot... and runs Xvesa instead...

[EddieRay]

Rebooted in text mode and went into /mnt/hda1/tce/optional and ran "tce-load -i Xfbdev.tcz"... then did a "sudo reboot"... still, the Xfbdev extension is not loading at boot time.... what am I missing?

[Guy]

Create a file in the tce directory, called onboot.lst.

List Xfbdev.tcz, and any other apps you want to load when you start the computer, in onboot.lst.

Don't list dependencies.

You must have .dep files in /tce/optional.