Re: X on an old laptop
Hi,
I(m using a T2000Sx Toshiba notebook with a 386SX-25 and
a monochrome VGA board inside. There is no hard disk, but I have an
expansion memory card (8Mb) plugged in and a parallel ZIP drive with
Debian 1.2 installed on a disk (I boot the kernel from a floppy, and
then the kernel mounts the root filesystem from the zip drive). I have
tried the VGA mono server once, it worked, but was kinda slow (10Mb swap
on a ZIP drive doesn't help much). However, once it was up and running
(bare fvwm as a window manager), it was quite smooth (mouse cursor wasn't
sluggish). Although this setup ate all the laptop's memory, I believe that
I can do better by removing still some more fonts and/or changing my shell
to something smaller than bash (running less getty's and removing the few
daemons - cron, atd - I have running would probably help, too).
Note that I haven't tried (and won't, actually) updating
the distro to anything newer, because AFAIK nothing recent will fit in so
small a configuration. And I had to install on the ZIP disk using another
computer, too, because this laptop doesn't have PCMCIA nor CD drive, and
installing on such a model via PPP would be a pain. On the other hand, I
don't really have to update, because it works perfectly well (as I said, I
don't use X on it) and is even able to drive an external modem or be
connected via PPP to my local network.
This is probably not useful anyhow, but you wanted a success report ;-)
Best regards
raph
--
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS/TW/MU d(+) s:- a-- C++ UL++>+$ P+ L+++>+ E- W N o? K? (!)w-- O? M V?
PS+ !PE Y PGP+ t? 5? X++@ R? !tv b+++ DI? D+ G++ e h r(-)% y+
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
On Tue, 18 Apr 2000, John Parejko wrote:
> So, what do you all think my chances are of getting X working on a Zeos
> Laptop 386 (yes, that is its name). It is a 386SX/16 with 4 megs of ram,
> and a 540 meg HDD (I upgraded it to that, up from a 20). I've got Debian
> on it right now, and it is pretty happy (mmm... 6 virtual terminals... DOS
> can't do that ;-).
>
> Does anyone else have any experience with getting X running on something
> about this old? I've given it a 64M swap partition (or maybe 80M, I'm not
> sure). Screen is a Mono LCD... so it won't be pretty, but it would be
> interesting to try anyway.
>
> and I can't seem to get the modem to work, but I think I just need to futz
> with it.
>
> anyway, any suggestions would be appreciated.
>
> thanx
> me
>
> ---------------------
> John Parejko
> parejkoj@gridley.acns.carleton.edu
> Student, Carleton College
> ---------------------
>
>
> --
> To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-laptop-request@lists.debian.org
> with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
>
>
Reply to: