Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> sindi keesan wrote:
> > We are trying to install it to a laptop computer
> > with 640K base plus 4M extended RAM,
>
> Does that come to 5mb RAM?
I think it adds to about 4.6MB.  The above is how the diagnostic program 
lists the memory.

> > We typed boot and it started to boot linux with loadlin,
> > slowly, started to uncompress linux, and then went black.
>
> My guess is RAM.  Not enough?  Faulty?

I booted with the fast pentium and loadlin ... mem=4M and that worked 
fine.  Also on another pentium with 8MB physical memory we got lots of 
error messages about swapping failing but it did boot and asked us to type 
Enter.  I can do a RAM check with memtest before giving up on this laptop 
computer.

> > I mentioned the failed floppy boot because that also
> > gave us a black screen
>
> Wasn't that insufficient RAM?
Yes, but with 8MB RAM on another computer there was no black screen with 
floppy boot.  I can try a pentium with mem=4M and floppy boot to see if 
that gives us a black screen.

The black screen failure would not reboot Ctrl-Alt-Del.
For a while it was accessing the hard drive even with a black screen, 
every few seconds a blink.  Maybe loadlin was not using the swap file?
Could there be something peculiar about this extended RAM?

> > This is a cirrus video chip.  Might linux not support it?
>
> No, it's not the video chip.

25MB does not seem adequate for a DOS partition on a computer with 4MB RAM 
and BL3.32.  We filled 31MB (including DOS Kermit used to download the 
.zip file in the first place, swap.zip and the unzipped version of it, 
bl3-32.zip and fs.img and zimage etc.).  I would recommend 32MB absolute 
minimum (or less if you can get the linux files on there some other way 
than downloading, such as putting it into another computer to copy to it 
and omitting the zip files).

If there is some way to shrink fs.img to the bare minimum (4MB?) you could 
have a smaller DOS partition.  That would have to be done on another 
computer first, and then there is the problem of how to transfer fs.img - 
upload and download?  We have not yet tried serial cable (nullmodem) 
transfer but plip and llpro-parallel would NOT transfer fs.img or the big 
zip file properly.  We may try DOS Kermit transfer next.  Or llpro-serial.
Why would parallel mess up a transfer of fs.img when modem does not and 
ethernet does not?  I never did figure out how to transfer files in dumb 
terminal mode with Kermit.

Can you explain again how to modify the size of fs.img?

Both our 386s with 4-5MB RAM came with 80MB hard drives, which leaves 48MB 
for linux. Part of the DOS partition could be converted later to a swap 
partition.  I notice you used 6.7MB swap file instead of 2x4MB - is this a 
compromise between 2x3MB and 2x4MB?  We did 2x4.6=9.2MB.  Would 6.7 work 
about as well?  How do swap files or partitions actually help?  I was told 
something to the effect that they are set up to swap data from RAM to HD 
faster than a regular hard drive (partition) or at least the HD space is 
all contiguous (swap file).

On the fast pentium, BL3 (as far as I took it) seemed to run as fast in 
4MB RAM as in 64MB, perhaps because of the faster RAM and HD.  Without a 
swap file it was a lot slower.  With a swap file I could go into X and 
load links at 800x600x12 (15).  Are there pentium laptops that came with 
4MB RAM?  We have a 486 laptop with 2MB.

> Cheers,
> Steven
>
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keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org