UPDATE - Was Re: Challenge - Getting Debian Working on a Pair of Real Old Laptops

On Tue, 2008-09-02 at 21:52 -0700, Scarletdown wrote:
I have a pair of old P-I based Toshiba Laptops (Satellite Pro 425CDT and
Portege 650CT), and I am trying to figure out how to get a working
Debian installation on them. These laptops are very light on RAM. The
Satellite has 40MB (which I believe is the most she can take), and the
Portege has 24MB (can take up to 80MB).

Both of them have successfully run Windows 98SE, so I figure they should
be able to run an ultra lightweight Debian desktop as well. For the
local desktop setup, which will just be mostly for maintenance purposes,
I am wanting to use LXDE as my desktop environment with the only
additional X-based apps installed being XMMS (these have decent on board
sound, so it would be a shame to let it go to waste), and Dillo, for
basic graphical web browsing.

The primary use for these two laptops however, will be as thin clients
which would connect to another more fully featured Debian system via
XDMCP. For this, I will use GDM, since none of the other login managers
I have tried have any easy way to select remote login as a session.

I am guessing that these laptops can't use a 2.6 kernel, since I tried
Damn Small Linux (which uses 2.4) on them just to see if I could get a
working desktop, and was able to run Fluxbox and get on the Web with
Dillo.

So now that I know that these laptops can boot up into functional Linux
systems, are there any suggestions I might try to get a proper "pure"
Debian setup on them? I don't want to go with DSL, because there are
just too many annoying little details to configure manually. Come to
think of it, I don't really want to go with any live distro.

This project is progressing (slow and painful, but it is progressing).
Here is where I am at now:

Woody installed via a set of Net Install floppies from
http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/

Portege boots up and networking is enabled.

XFree86 is installed with GDM as the login manager and IceWM as my
window manager of choice (LXDE does not work on a 2.2 kernel,
apparently). Desktop looks pretty nice and runs fast enough.

Pre-X configuration archived onto my NAS drive via PartImage (just in
case I need to start over).

Kernel 2.4.18 installed and LILO configured to select either that one or
the 2.2.20 kernel.

Now for the problems still remaining (and new issues as well)

1: When running the 2.4 kernel, the PCMCIA manager does not detect the
PCMCIA NIC (3Com 3CCFE574BT), so no network connectivity when running
2.4.

2: The version of GDM that is installed has no menu options to
configure GDM or to connect via XDMCP (not even a menu for
Reboot/Shutdown/Restart X, etc).

3: Attempting to do a dist-upgrade after pointing apt to
ftp.us.debian.org fails due to some issue with upgrading e2fsprogs.
(don't remember the error unfortunately).

4: No sound, despite having esound installed.

I guess the biggest issue is the second one. The whole point of this
project was to set up a thin client to connect to a more able-bodied
Linux box via the "Connect via XDMCP" option from GDM. Unfortunately,
this version does not have it. Is there a way to enable the other
typical menus in GDM, or does this version (don't remember the version
number, but it should be whatever the final version of GDM was before
Woody was retired) predate those features?

If the former, then issues 1 and 3 are nonissues, since running 2.2.20
would be sufficient for this system. If the latter, then issue 1 needs
to be addressed, since I suspect that if I can get networking working
with the 2.4 kernel, then I should be able to dist-upgrade to etch and
have a more recent version of GDM and other desirable features.




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