Further Misadventures in Linuxland

[vakkotaur]

Now, icelandic isn't the latest and greatest machine, I know. It's not even yesterday's. It's a Pentium MMX 166 MHz with 64 MB RAM. It also uses a serial pointer rather than a PS/2 pointer. This seems to confuse many linux distributions, even ones for older equipment as evidently serial pointers are now not old but downright ancient.

I'd downloaded the last ISO for MEPIS Lite a few days ago and last night I thought I'd give it a try. I didn't get very far. I expected to run into RAM limitations or find things sluggish from the older CD drive and the use even the lite version of KDE. I didn't get to find out. MEPIS Lite booted from CD and put up a nice screen where I could select which configuration I wanted to boot. So far, so good. I had the choice of a 2.6 linux kernel, or a 2.4 linux kernel, or a 2.4 linux kernel with the rest in a minimal configuration, or I could do a memory test. I chose the 2.4 kernel and minimum configuration. This was done by keyboard navigation, so I knew the keyboard was working.

Once again, a PS/2 interface seems to have been detected or assumed (it does exist, but it's also disabled in the BIOS stuff) and a PS/2 mouse assumed, completely ignoring the very real and connected serial trackball. It also managed to not do anything useful with the network card, much as KATEOS failed to deal with the network card. (The network card does work, the Gentoo install I attempted let me ssh into the system during initial setup, but some distros can't deal with it. Huh.) That wasn't the worst. Networking and pointers can be made to work later, after logging in and seeing what's amiss.

Aye, there's the rub. MEPIS Lite seems to insist on having the pointer (which it got wrong) work in order to log in. The keyboard was effectively dead, and I was at the graphical login screen. So, it's virtual console time, right? What virtual console? It was graphical or nothing. I tried a few times to see if a different selection changed anything, with no luck. Not only was the login broken, there was no way to fix it. Scratch another distribution off of the list.