(Mis)adventures in Linux-land

[vakkotaur]

Friday night I thought I'd get breton going. This is a Pentium-I 90 MHz machine with 32 MB RAM and a 1.2 G HDD. I expected I'd toss PC-DOS on it and some primitive linux that could live there. On a whim I grabbed a Lycoris install CD that was lying near the floppies. I fully expected the Lycoris install to fail right away, complaining that there wasn't enough machine.

It should have. It didn't. It installed. It took me two tries since it was late and I blew it Friday night, but Saturday I tried again. It recognized the old hardware. It almost ran. There just wasn't enough machine there for it.

After looking though DistroWatch's list of linux (and BSD) distributions, I decided to try DeLi Linux (Desktop Light) on breton. DeLi is Slackware based (oh well), aimed at 486 to PI-166 machines, small, light, and promising. But it's also 0.6.1 beta and not for beginners (and I still consider myself to be one when it comes to Linux). I am trying it anyway.

First lesson: Just because there is an install ISO and a machine can boot from CD (it did for the Lycoris install) doesn't mean the ISO makes a really bootable CD that the machine can use. Boot floppies were needed.

Second lesson: L 40 40 40 40... is how Lilo complains (or passes on the complaint from the hardware) that the HDD is too big. There are two ways out of this: enable LBA in BIOS, or do partitioning to make sure the boot partition isn't too big. I was lucky and LBA was a workable option.

Third lesson: Just because the install script and CD seem to be installing everything is not a reason to believe it. DeLi must be booted into, the CD drive mounted, and deliinstall run then.

Fourth lesson: DeLi is a simple-minded creature and while having two network cards (machine was previously a firewall box) won't confuse it, it'll only use the first one it finds. Having only one card is sufficient and will prevent operator confusion.

Next lesson: Not finished. It's either getting network stuff beyond ping to work (sshd would be nice) or getting the trackball to work so that X is an option.

I'm not ready to give up on it yet, but I'm not going to go nuts over it either. On the good side, a full re-install doesn't take very long, so a worst-case wipe & start over isn't painful, merely annoying.