Stormix on a Compaq Pressario 305
Despite the claims on the website, Stormix is the only distribution I've been able to get to run on my new laptop.
After a visit to Linux World Expo in February, I came away with several different CD's of distributions:
These were all the free/download copies of the distributions.
I also had the following, from an unsuccessful attempt at installing it on a 486:
When I got the Compaq Pressario 305 I decided I'd try it out as a linux machine and started playing with it. I had the following mixed results:
- Turbo Linux Server- didn't even try, it's a laptop. I had a copy of Turbo workstation ... somewhere
- Stormix - installed, after much work and cursing, see below. Then I got bored.
- "Sounds of Slashdot" - I thought this was music! It installed, I think, maybe, command line user environment only, I don't understand it. Guess I don't get the CLUE.
- FreeBSD - another case of it installed, I think, CLUE only, despite asking it to install X-windows
- Caldera - the graphic installation was very pretty, and let me see what settings it selected, and then I got to play tetris while it copied and compiled, then it rebooted and the display went berserk.
- Mandrake - it seems to hang while it tried to probe for the display ... and hang ... and hang ... nevermind
The 305 has the following configuration
(thank you Jim McGovern for the list)
- Intel ® Celeron processor 333 MHz
- 11.3" TFT Active Matrix display
- 64 MB SyncDRAM, upgradable to 128 MB
- 4.3 GB hard drive
- 24X Max CD-ROM drive integrated with drive slice(1)
- 128KB integrated L2 Pipeline Burst Cache
- LiIon battery
- 56K ITU V.90 modem
- ATI Rage Pro accelerated graphics
- Keyboard/Touchpad
- Ultra-light at only 3.1 Ibs and Ultra-thin at 0.89" x 10.4" x 9.0"(2)
- LCD Status Display
Adventures in Stormix-land
After installing Stormix successfully several times I'd like to give the following warning:
Have a boot disk available with your preferred flavor of fdisk on it. Somewhere between the FreeBSD and the Caldera installs, LiLo got hosed and died on LI, even after I'd reinstalled Stormix. I had to use "fdisk /mbr" to fix it. Nice to know IS194 (aka the morning nap) still comes in handy.
Step by step install (what worked, eventually)
- the Stormix CD is bootable, and the CD-ROM is in the boot sequence, so I was able to start the install without much trouble ... every time.
- The touchpad was found automatically.
- The video card, monitor, sound card and modem didn't autodetect. Actually, they were found, but the install scripts couldn't match them to drivers. I will probably have to do one more install or some tweaking to get them to work. Go fig.
- I was able to install using the graphical installer once. I prefer the text installer. It's not as visually exciting, but the the computer doesn't suspend itself (requiring the removal of the battery pack to reset) from inactivity. In either case, you have to remember to move the pointer/cursor from time to time.
- The current partitioning is 103 MB for swap, 2GB (approximately) for / and the remainder unallocated and intended for Win98. It has been any number of schema, from all one / partition to what happened when I let FreeBSD have it's way (lots of mount points). After several installs, I use the custom partitioning scheme and only swap and /
- When it came time to select the monitor video card I selected a standard 800x600 monitor and took a guess that the ATI 3D Rage Pro would use a similar driver to other ATI Rage Pro cards. It tested correctly and worked. I have since found out that my guess was correct, by looking at the Xfree86 Video Card/Server List (mirrors in australia, at the kernel.org site, and in germany, please use the closest)
More updates to come.
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