X on 64Mb notebook

[colt]

Hi,

I'm new to TCL. I find this an extremely useful system, and i wanted to install it to my old P1 notebook, which has an AMD K6 processor, and 64Mb of RAM.

The boot CD boots fine, but i have no X, with none of selectable window managers at boot. I have tried TCL 3.6 .

Is it possible to have X with 64Mb of RAM? Or it is possible that the lack of X is because of the VGA card? (Machine has a Trident Cyberblade).

Thanks for any help

[Rich]

Hi colt
So you wind up at a command prompt? If so, enter  Xvesa -listmodes  and see what support resolutions are reported.
Then reboot. When the F1, F2, F3  screen comes up, enter  tinycore xvesa=800x600x8
Substitute appropriate numbers as reported by the Xvesa command.

[colt]

It gives "xvesa : command not found" .
I have tried boot option xvesa=800x600x8 (display is 800x600), but there is only command prompt.
I have tried live CD on a virtual machine, with 64Mb RAM and i get only command prompt, too.

[Rich]

Hi colt
Linux is case sensitive, it's Xvesa, not xvesa.

[bmarkus]

Isn't the command

TC ...

or

MC ...

?

[colt]

Command not found, too :S

[Rich]

Hi bmarkus
He is using TC3.6. It was shortened to tc, but I don't recall in which revision.

@colt: When you get to the F2, F3, F4 screen, hit F2 and read what it says at the top of the screen. That will tell you
            what you need to enter in front of the xvesa=  boot code.

Command not found, too :S

Are you sure you burned a Tinycore and not a Microcore CD? What do you get if you enter  version

[curaga]

Maybe this laptop is old enough that TC doesn't recognize the cd drive? See if "dmesg" has any info.

[colt]

TinyCore 4.2.1, kernel 3.0.3...

How can i check cdrom with live CD?

[colt]

I think it is possible that there is some problems with the CD-ROM, or the HDD controller itself. Slitaz fails boot with kernel panic because it cannot recognize the drive where it booted from. Win98 bootdisk cannot read CD disk, when i'm installing it (i had to install with a workaround). But the controller itself is OK, because Slackware 10, for instance, boots and installs OK.

[Rich]

Hi colt
A quick and dirty way of checking what drives were recognized would be to enter the command   ls /mnt

[colt]

Gives nothing, /mnt is empty. I have checked before

[Rich]

Hi colt
You may just have to take a look through dmesg and see what kind of errors it's reporting. If you enter   dmesg > dmesg.txt
and then   less dmesg.txt   you should be able to PageUp/PageDown   through the file, Esc to return to the prompt.
If you can figure a way to get the file off of the machine, like with a serial port,  you could attach it to your next post.

[gerald_clark]

Try CorePlus V4.4rc1.

[colt]

Hi,

Here is dmesg output, i hope that it helps I haven't got so much time, so i only runned over it, but haven't see any errors.

I haven't tried 4.4 yet, because the machine can read only one-time writable CD's, from which i have no more pieces. (I will, but later.)

Another thing is came on my mind, so this machine cannot boot CD from itself, so i have to use a floppy, which boots, and then boots the CD disk in the drive.
Can it be the root problem? I think it can cause that kernel is believing that he's booted from a floppy?