succesful install

[dikgee]

I have an old laptop, Dell Inspiron 8100 purchased in dec 2001. It finally crashed.
 
Tried using the recover disck from dell, hung up at installing devices, pulled plug.
Tried doing a full restore, hung up at installing devices, needed to pull the plug again
tried using a XP HOME disc, hug up at installing devices
Ran chkdsk, memtest86, no obvious problems.

Now is the time to move to LINUX, right.......

My cd/rw is only 656 MB, too small for Ubuntu
Tried Puppy, hung up after pcmia, had to pull plug


tried dam small unix, hung up, had to pull plug

Tried tiny core and BOOTED no problems... FANTASTIC
None of the other OS's gave any indication what the problem was. I know it has to be a hardware problem . Now at least I can build things up and maybe find out what doesn't work. I have been retired for the past 11 years and really need to brush up on my unix skills

THANKS FOR NOT HANGING UP

[Rich]

Hi dikgee
Congratulations and welcome to the Tinycore forum. I'm writing this from an Inspiron 8000.

[MikeLockmoore]

Welcome!  Maybe look at the output of the dmesg utility and the output of the lspci and lsmod utilities to get some idea what is wrong.

[dikgee]

 Thanks Mikel, I tried /bin/dmesg , also tried ismod and ispci both got a "not found". Doing a ls on /bin i can see ismod, but not ispci.

My first task should be to get my wireless connection working. I also typed in "tinycore laptop". The boot sequence showed it enabled AC and Pcmcia. I haven't found were I can place that so it executes every time I boot, There is a lot of reading to do,,,,,,,
 I pluged in  my card (netgear W511v2) and saw some confusing entries in dmesg.
 isapnp: scanning for pnp devices
 isapnp: no plug and play devices found

later in listing

pnp: pnp acpi: found 15 devices


later....

pcmcia_socket card bus card inserted into slot 0

much later
e100:eth0: e100_request_firmware: failed to load

one thing I noticed was that my netgear card did not have power. It seems to have been detected but not turned on???  Not sur why?

Also did not seem to detect my sound (ESS maestro 3)Also were can I find

Is there a way to modify the mouse setup. TMy synaptics had tap feature which drove me nuts. move the cursor over an icon and it opens it if the sensitivity is to much. There is a mouse utility, but the only adjustment is for speed.

I will keep reading so excuse me if i ask too many questions.....

thank you

[maro]

@dikgee: I guess you appreciate that an awful lot of tools that other distributions are packing in their 600-700 Mbytes (or even into ca. 100 MB) can't possibly be expected to be included in a 10 MB ISO file. The basic idea of TC is to give you enough to start with and download all additional stuff as extensions as and when required.

Therefore the ISO file does not contain the 'lspci' or 'lsusb' utilities they are available via the 'pci-utils.tcz' and 'usb-utils.tcz' extensions. Likewise there is no direct support for sound or WiFi in the ISO file, which gives you essentially a choice for the former between OSS or alsa. And for the latter it depends on your hardware, your WiFi setup (e.g. WEP or WPA) and whether you want a GUI or you are happy (and able) to create a small startup script file instead.

But to address things step-by-step I'd suggest to initally focus on the wireline NIC: A large range of those are automatically detected when booting from CD-ROM and hence would allow to initially operate in the so called "cloud mode". Unfortunately your NIC seems to be one of those few that require a file contained in the 'firmware.tcz' extension to work, and that creates a bit of a "catch-22" situation for you. This has been raised and discussed several times in the forum (e.g. here or here), so please use the search function to look for phrases related to either "e100" or "offline download" to first read up on what others have done before you.

Regarding your WiFi card I assume you mean WG511v2. I still own a WG511 (v1 I assume) which IIRC was working with the 'ndiswrapper.tcz' extension (plus the Windows driver files). But with this card in particular I consider it very important to be first 100% certain what kind of card the kernel really detects. I'd therefore highly recommend to use the relevant output from lspci -vnn to be sure of it. You could then again first search the forum before asking questions that might have already been answered previously.

[Rich]

Hi dikgee
My laptop has the same ESS maestro 3 chip as yours. Use AppsBrowser to download alsaconf.tcz
and leave the download option set to OnBoot.
Run alsaconf
Run alsactl store

These lines go into /opt/filetool.lst

etc/modprobe.conf
etc/asound.state
opt/alsa

and these go into /opt/bootlocal.sh

# Start the alsa sound driver
/usr/local/etc/init.d/alsasound start
# Restore the mixer volume levels
/usr/local/sbin/alsactl restore

If you want a nice GUI for adjusting volume levels download alsagui.tcz.

[siddartha]

I'm new and struggling to customize tinycore. So I'm not trying to spoil the fun, but I use Parted Magic. It's very light on resources, quite good at autodetect and filled with tools for recovery, identification and backup.

[dikgee]

siddatha thanks for the info on "parted magic". I tried it, but it also hung up. However I used the failsafe menue, and it looks like my sound is the problem. The last entry is......

acpi: pci interupt (LNKB) enable IRQ5
Maestro3 0000:02:03.0: PCI inta -> link[LNKB]->GSI5 (level,low) => IRQ5

I do not completely understand the message, (level low) does not sound like a reason to stop things. can any one explaine?

I guess this makes sense tho,  since tinycore doesn't support sound, that's why tinycore booted up and allthe others I've tried (Including windows) hang up.

ESS Technologies manufactured maestro3, but has no info on that product, and Dell stoped supporting the 8100 last year.

The 8100 service manual I have doesn;t show were maretro 3 is located, so it must be a chip set not a card. Can not seem to find anything that looks like it should bemaestro. I have an ess part number,i/ll see if anything shows up on the web.


one step closer.......

[Rich]

Hi dikgee
I get the same message in dmesg. Install  firmware.tcz, it contains firmware to support your chip.