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.

Ok...well things are moving along.....slowly. I have installed a wireless pci card (atheros chip) in my k-6 desktop, and it is up and running. The AT&T card is up and running on the lapptop. Still need to install the Motorolla USB adapter on the windows box. I have configured the two machines up and running but can't get them to talk. I'm kind of stumbling along blindly here but so far I have;

- ifconfig ath0 up
- ifconfig ath0 xxx.xx.xx.xx (ip)
- ifconfig ath0 mode ad-hoc
- ifconfig ath0 rate 11MB
- iwconfig ath0 essid pluto

Now I go to either machine and type

iwlist ath0 peers.........and get no scan results

i'm gonna put together a DSL wireless as-hoc network. been wanting to do this for a while, and now is the time.i'm going to network 3 machines, may even try samba with my winblows box later. my 3 machines are as follows;

1- Desktop 850mhz duron, 256mb ram, 160gb hd, dualbooting w2k and DSL liveCD

2- Desktop 350mhz K-6, 64mb ram, 8gb hd, booting DSL hd install

3- Laptop 400mhz celeron, 192mb ram, 10gb hd, booting DSL frugal

3 different machines, 3 different installs...should be interesting, or impossible, we will see.

will try and keep the blog updated, no promises though........

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.

Hello, I have recently installed DSL 2.0 on a old laptop. 550 mhz 5 gig harddrive. I am having two problems so far. One is that when I leave the machine after about 5 mins it blanks out the screen and locks me out. Two I cannot get my Linksys wireless card to work. When I go to the PCIMA card control it shows that socket 0 has a card and is ready. But when I go to wlcardconfig it says that there is network card found. Any help would be great.

Thanks

Recently I was experimenting around with some other very small Linux systems. I was given an opportunity to 'play' with an old Toshiba T4700ct notebook, which is a 486 running from a 320 megabyte hard drive and a whopping 8 megs or ram! THere is no Cdrom, thus all things needed to come from floppy, so I downloaded Basic Linux BL3 and proceeded. Now, I am not superbly adept at Linux and every new experience is both troublesome and rewarding. Uusally, I run into a stump or two right off the bat, and this time was no different. Firstly, I could not get 'x' to work. Apparently, dos 6.22 'interferes' with BL3 being able to read rom, so the Toshiba has to be started by pressing the alt-f5 buttons to bypass the autoexe.bat and config.sys files at boot. After doing that I got 'x' to work. Then I needed to edit some files. I had never had any luck editing files and the reason is something I think ALL NEWBIES need to be told. In fact, I think the designers of the Pico Editor need to revamp the format or at least make things CLEAR. In order to use the commands in Pico the help files say to press ^x or ^XY or so on. I had tried pressing ^ANYTHING for several months before this--all to no avail. Secondly the ^ sign is a CAPITAL 6 on the keyboard and pressing ^ and any other key is almost impossible , much less TWO keys as the Pico help guide instructs. I just so happened to be checking how to edit pppsetup and a Slackware guide mentioned that the ^ sign meant to push the CONTROL button!! Well, for crying out loud!! Why,, WHY isn't that the CLEAR instructions in the Pico editor??!! Sure enough, I pressed CONTROL x and VIOLA--I got Pico to WORK for the VERY FIRST time EVER! I can honestly say that the Linux fanatics that holler about how 'easy' Linux is to use could stand to learn from this lesson. This was one of the most confusing issues I have faced in the Linux world yet. And ,it is WAAAy to simple to have been overcome in the beginning by responsible programming. The ^ sign is NOT the CONTROL button. So, I hope this might help other users who read this.

Lately while browsing the web i fell om dsl and gave it a try on my old rusty pentium (not used for 5 years)
pentium 75
64 ram
200m harddisk
realteck ethernet card
and an unknown sound card
it worked just fine
i m typing from it now while listening to my favorite Mp3
too cool!!!!!
i did harddisk install which left only free 32 mega on my pc
what can i say great disro guys
keep it up
makes an excellent rescue disk also
definitely something to have :))))

Through no fault of my own, I recently re-aquired my old laptop. It's an Ultra Pentium P3 500 with 128 megs of ram. I had it for about a year and then I replaced it and issued it to the receiving department. It lived there for another three years before that fateful day when I got the call. Originally I had upgraded to 256 but the cheap stick of ram I bought from TigerDirect took a dump and that's how I ended up with this thing back. Pronounced dead at the office I disposed of it at my place. along with the ram issue, Win98 was suffering horrible bit rot. (besides, it was Win98!)

I tried a couple of heavier installs like Debian and CentOS but the poor thing just couldn't cut it. I even gave PCLinuxOS a shot but it just wouldn't talk to my WaveLan.(I don't know what that was all about. It's a WaveLan for crying out loud!) And what good is a laptop without wireless? So, I downloaded DSL 2.1. Most excellent! I love the improvements. I will use this one for a while. This makes a NICE machine!

Ok, now to cut the umbilical cord from the jukebox and get the wireless nic running. At $14.99 from Fry's, that Airlink nic has to be one of the best buys ever.

During some previous research on the web, I saw that the AWLH 4030 is supported by the Madwifi project. Just as I was about to go down the slippery slope of using CVS to obtain source code and then attempt to compile it, I saw a post from roberts saying that madwifi.dsl had been posted in the testing section. Ya Hoo!

Installed the package and ran madwifi_setup.sh, but had no joy. I'm not so sure why it didn't work for me, and truth be told after the first failure I went to the source and read the docs at: http://madwifi.org/wiki/UserDocs/FirstTimeHowTo Heres what ended up working for me: