DSL Talk

I was pretty pleased with myself for getting the 486 up and running - although this was pretty short lived when I found that I had no network. I could see that DSL recognised the NIC a DLink DE-220P and started the eth0 service, but I couldn't get a network connection. Even the ADSL modem/router wasn't recognising the box.

Googling on linux and DLink DE-220P showed that this card was supported, good news but not helpful.

After mucking around with the control panel and anything vaguely related to network setup (none of which was any good) I looked in the System Stats button, and the DMESG tab showed that the NIC was being recognised (IRQ5), but also NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out.

Just solved a problem on a 486DX2/66 16MB. I had carried out an HD install, but could not get it to boot completely into X. The problem was I had created a swap partition with cfdisk but hadn't mkswap'd or swapon'd it. (I guess that means I hadn't formatted it or turned it on).

The commands I'd missed out were -

mkswap /dev/hda1
swapon /dev/hda1

If you are doing a hd install then see this page

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Installing_to_the_Hard_Disk

as well as following the instructions in Dillo.

I recently came across this problem. On boot up the bios was erroring with what looked like a conflict with the hard disk and cd rom. Booting into the bios setup everything looked ok - checked the cables and jumpers on both devices and all was ok. Bios also gave me the option of continuing to boot disregarding this error. DSL would start to load before finally halting with the message Resource Conflict PCI Bus:00 Device:0D Function:00

Googling turned up very little that seemed helpful, but one result mentioned checking the cards - sure enough it turned out that the retaining screw on my video card was loose. After making sure the card was properly seated and the retaining screw was properly tightened, I rebooted.