Debian on a Super Lean Laptop Part I - Making it Work
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From: Andrew Sackville-West on 21 Apr 2010 23:00 On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 06:30:58PM -0700, Scarletdown wrote: > This may, at first glance, appear to be an exercise into insanity, but it is > a rather important little project to me. > > I have this old Toshiba Satellite laptop (P-120, 6GB had drive, and a > whoppong 24MB RAM) that is currently running 98SE Lite. It runs adequately > on Windows, but now I would like to make it dual boot with Debian. [...] > The build box boots the bare bones build beautifully. However, the laptop > hangs when I try to boot into Linux. Specifically, the last thing shown on > the screen before nothing else happens is: > > initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-3-486 > [Linux-initrd @ 0x10b3000, 0x76cdf9 bytes] > > After that, she's locked up tight, and all I can do is power off. > > This is obviously a problem with initrd. Set too large for such a low > memory system perhaps? If so, what can be done to fix this? Perhaps. You could certainly build a kernel that doesn't require the initrd. You'd probably benefit a lot from running a custom kernel anyway. .02 A
From: deloptes on 24 Apr 2010 05:00
Tzafrir Cohen wrote: > On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 03:24:31PM +0200, deloptes wrote: >> Joey Hess wrote: >> >> > Scarletdown wrote: >> >> initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-3-486 >> >> [Linux-initrd @ 0x10b3000, 0x76cdf9 bytes] >> >> >> >> After that, she's locked up tight, and all I can do is power off. >> >> >> >> This is obviously a problem with initrd. Set too large for such a low >> >> memory system perhaps? >> > >> > I doubt it, since your initrd is only 7 mb. >> > >> > This seems more likely to be a problem with your bootloader. Quite >> > possibly grub is not configured to read the initrd from the correct >> > disk device. It can be hard to get that right when preparing an disk >> > image on another machine. >> > >> > Or possibly, given the age of the hardware, the initrd is not located >> > near enough to the front of the drive for grub to be able to access it. >> > (Which is why having a separate /boot partition first used to be a good >> > idea.) >> > >> >> I would take a live-cd or usb disk (there are images available). Avoid >> using gnome or kde - your system wont make it. > > A Live CD puts some files in a ramdisk, and thus wastes some more RAM. > I mean to install from it ;-) ... cause it will use the kernel that it is booting with (AFAIK) If you are able to boot from the live cd or usb then you can use those kernels for your new system (or for a fallback to debug further) Did you try reinstalling grubinto your MBR or debugging the initrd? In your situation I would just put this old disk in my new pc and install using debootstrap. then configure the system and put the drive back in the target pc. it will take about 1h. regards good luck regards -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST(a)lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster(a)lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/hqubh0$u6h$1(a)dough.gmane.org |