-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Bannister [mailto:cbannister@slingshot.co.nz]
Sent: Tuesday, March 05, 2013 3:04 AM
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Debian on 256MB PIII TabletPC
On Mon, Mar 04, 2013 at 09:49:12AM -0500, Steven Grunza wrote:
Hello. I would like to install Debian on a laptop with 256 MB of
RAM.
Is this possible? I was previously running Ubuntu but there are
problems in the Ubuntu X11 server code that cause the touchscreen
to
be unusable.
Installing onto a laptop can be problematic as each model as its
own quirks and idiosynracies. Without knowing the model we can only
guess.
Actually I did mention it was an Acer TravelMate C100 in the original
post...
There is a specialised list for laptops:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-laptop
I didn't want to ask the same question on two lists. My experience with
the Fedora laptop list was less than wonderful -- we'll leave it at
that.
To answer my own question, yes it is possible to install.
But you can't run it.
After rebooting I get a "GRUB Geom error".
No amount of booting from a rescue disk and attempting to install grub
onto /dev/sda seems to work. The install didn't generate any errors so
there's no error code to report. I know there isn't much that can be
done without the syslog and dmesg output (while running in rescue mode)
but at this time I'm going to have to just put my TravelMate C100 on a
shelf and move on with life. Sometimes the hardware really is just too
old...