iB::Topic::How to install on old laptop with 8MB Ram

	Damn Small Linux :: Damn Small Linux Board The DSL Forums

» Welcome Guest
[ Log In :: Register ]

Damn Small Linux Board » Damn Small Linux » Laptops » How to install on old laptop with 8MB Ram

		Mini-ITX Boards Sale, Fanless BareBones Mini-ITX, Bootable 1G DSL USBs, 533MHz Fanless PC <-- SALE $200 each!
		Get The Official Damn Small Linux Book. DSL Market , Great VPS hosting provided by Tektonic

[ Track this topic :: Email this topic :: Print this topic ]

Topic: How to install on old laptop with 8MB Ram

< Next Oldest | Next Newest >

JakkyTchong Offline

Group: Members
Posts: 2
Joined: Jan. 2007

Posted: Jan. 31 2007,06:18

Hi,

I've got an old Nixdorf Siemens, model pcd-4 ncsl, laptop. It has 8MB or ram and I'm not sure about the size of the hard drive. Around 50MB I think. No CD drive, no NIC, no USB. Only floppy, serial, parallel, PCMCIA, "AT Bus".

Windows 3.1 is running on that computer. I'd like to install a linux distribution with a functional GUI on it (DSL seems good).

How the heck am I suppose to get the thing on this dino?

u2musicmike Offline

Group: Members
Posts: 149
Joined: April 2006

Posted: Jan. 31 2007,17:36

I think you will find that you need at least 16M and a bigger harddrive for swap. If you can expand your ram and you could make your harddrive a swapfile then you might could run DSL on a compact flash with a PCMCIA adapter but you would have to use a boot floppy.

I don't know what kind of CPU is in a Nixdorf Siemens but I put another harddrive with DSL into a 386 with 8M and it wouldn't work. With your limited hardware you might want to try Blueflops or Basic Linux 3. Do a google search on them.

roberts

Group: Members
Posts: 4983
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: Jan. 31 2007,18:44

The lowest ram to boot into GUI with DSL was 12MB by user clivesay. It was not practical, but it, I believe set a new low ram record!

JakkyTchong Offline

Group: Members
Posts: 2
Joined: Jan. 2007

Posted: Jan. 31 2007,21:18

Finally I found out that the HDD was a 126MB. A little bit better. I'm currently doing some tests with Basic Linux... The game isn't over yet... I've put the files in c:\baslin, rebooted with a dos boot disk and ran c:\baslin\boot.bat. It boots. As soon as I run "startx" to activate the stand alone GUI, it crashes... The first time I ran startx, it asked few questions like "screen resolution", "which port for the mouse", etc. but now it just crashes. The error it gives (I could not read it all cause it disapeared too fast) was something like interrupt...memory...?

3 replies since Jan. 31 2007,06:18

< Next Oldest | Next Newest >

[ Track this topic :: Email this topic :: Print this topic ]

Damn Small Linux Board » Damn Small Linux » Laptops » How to install on old laptop with 8MB Ram