A few problems...

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Soldato
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Newcastle/Aberdeen
Well in an act of kindness i decided to fix my dad up with a PC from spare parts lying around the house. It's gone a lot better than i thought it would have... here's the basics:

PII with MMX
ATI Rage Pro 3D (assuming drivers work? how to check)
Creative CT2959
7GB Maxtor HDD
280MB RAM
and what makes it all worth it... Slitaz!

So yeah, boots up in well less than a minute and works fine for most tasks... namely web browsing and word processing. I'd be quite happy to leave it at that, but i thought i should iron out the niggles and 'optimise' it before handing it over. So if you don't much mind i'll start out with the three major ones (discounting the above):

  • Sound - As far as i'm aware EVERY Creative ISA Sound Card is supported by the ALSA drivers. Drivers that are included with every 2.6 kernel (Slitaz 3.0 uses 2.6.30.6). So i'm not entirely sure why it doesn't work. And by doesn't work i mean 'no sound output at all'. Strange thing is, i can't see the volume control on the panel and i'm unable to open alsamixer. I did install this card after the OS installation however, but i did have the same problems beforehand.
  • Swap - I decided to complement the RAM by using some precious hard drive space as SWAP. 900ish MB just to round it off. Again, i did this after the OS installation but i'm not entirely sure it's seen it, never mind used it. It's not in 'Mountbox' but i don't really know how to check. System Information showed a certain number of bytes that looked close enough to 280MB, the 'Virtual Memory' was higher but again i'm not sure.
  • Minitube - Less important i know, but rather than installing flash i thought it would be a good idea to try out this Minitube program i heard people talking about in the 10.04 thread. Obviously with a PII you'd still have to be patient but that's not the problem... the problem is that i have no idea how to install it :D

So that's it for now... i'm a bit stumpted, might be a few problems with the distro itself but i did check the MD5 before. Thanks in advance :)
 
Sure (sorry it took so long, had to find a PS/2 mouse with a middle button to paste):

Code: 
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX Host bridge (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX AGP bridge (rev 02)
00:0d.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9/0/1 Ethernet Pro 100 (rev 05)
00:14.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ISA (rev 02)
00:14.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
00:14.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 USB (rev 01)
00:14.3 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc 3D Rage Pro AGP 1X (rev 5c)

As for the partition, i just made it. But i can't check it, because sudo doesn't work. I installed it from the package manager and ran the command, this is what i got:

Code: 
[[B]user[/B]]@slitaz:~$ sudo fdisk-l

We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System
Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

    #1) Respect the privacy of others.
    #2) Think before you type.
    #3) With great power comes great responsibility.

Password: 
[[B]user[/B]] is not in the sudoers file.  This incident will be reported.

But then obviously without sudo i can't edit the sudoers file.

Code: 
[[b]user[/b]]@slitaz:~$ leafpad /etc/sudoers
Failed to open file '/etc/sudoers': Permission denied

So it just goes in a loop. The program that gives me permissions can't give me permissions because i don't have permissions... if that makes sense. My fstab looks like this however (without me making any changes):

Code: 
# /etc/fstab: Information about static filesystems.
#
proc            /proc        proc    defaults          0       0
sysfs           /sys         sysfs   defaults          0       0
devpts          /dev/pts     devpts  defaults          0       0
tmpfs           /dev/shm     tmpfs   defaults          0       0
#/dev/hda3       /home        ext3    defaults          0       2
#/dev/hdb1       /mnt/data    ext3    defaults          0       2
/dev/hda2       /home        ext3    defaults          0       2
/dev/cdrom      /media/cdrom iso9660 user,ro,noauto       0       0
/dev/hda3	swap	swap	default	0 0

and the 'free -m' command just gives me this:

Code: 
[[b]user[/b]]@slitaz:~$ free -m
BusyBox v1.12.0 (2010-03-12 18:25:03 CET) multi-call binary

Usage: free 

Display the amount of free and used system memory

Thanks.
 
Actually, it doesn't matter now. The power supply gave up pretty much as i was typing and rather than just replace it i remembered i have a PIII era Celeron rig that i bought from a friend for £1. Should be fine, but since it's only got two slots and i'm using the same RAM i've only got something like 198MB. Thing now though is that i've got a few choices of distribution, i think i'll let him make the ultimate decision but what do you think, out of these?

Lubuntu
Debian XFCE
Slitaz
Mint 8 LXDE
Debian XFCE Base with LXDE and some more apps to make it act and look like Lubuntu or Mint 8 but hopefully with a Debian base it will be a lot faster.
Something else.

Thanks.
 
Oh, another one i forgot to add to that list was Crunchbang Slater.

I tried Arch before and while i love any distro that includes space invaders in the bootloader i just couldn't get the installer to give me a working OS with a GUI.

But i'm liking NicNac's suggestion... thing is though the boot speed in 10.04 is blisteringly fast, and i don't think i could replicate that by installing different packages.

But if Lubuntu uses about half as much RAM as Xubuntu, and Debian XFCE also uses about half as much then an LXDE based Debian build would be brilliant.
 
Oxy said:
Arch linux destroy's all.

Did you follow the beginners guide?
Click to expand...

I did not, where might that be?

I'll tell you something though, all this messing around with 10 year old hardware has made me realise that for most users all of this cutting edge multi core technology just isn't necessary. I could probably make do with an Intel Atom or VIA C7 with the right OS.
 
Thanks for the link, i'll look through it but really, how hard can it be to make an installer like pretty much every other distribution has? Even Slitaz is easy to install, so it can't be a question of resources of size.

Hmm... currently doing my work experience placement for the council in Quadrant IT dept. and they often use TCDs, or Thin Client Devices. Now having a look through the BIOS of one it seemed pretty decent, a 1GHz Via C7 with 512MB RAM. Little onboard storage, but i could deal with that considering you can get similar models on the bay used for around £10.

That's less than it would cost to upgrade the RAM in this machine!
 
JHeaton said:
I found that installing Arch was the hardest part. After that, everything was pretty simple. However, I appreciate the KISS approach isn't for everyone and as such a lot of people won't enjoy the fact that the distribution, its developers and the package maintainers don't try to do things for you.

As an alternative, Debian would be good, though I do find it slightly heavier on resource usage. If you could get that with LXDE going well, it would probably be good enough for your needs :)
Click to expand...

It's not that they don't do things for you (just talking about the installation here), it's that they seem to go out of their way to make it hard for you.

I'm really getting into this TCD idea though, i'm suprised it isn't more popular. I found one with an AMD Geode LX800 and 256MB RAM for £10 new.
 
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