Live CD Boot - Can't View Desktop

Forum: X and Fluxbox
Topic: Live CD Boot - Can't View Desktop
started by: whitechocolate

Posted by whitechocolate on Jan. 06 2007,18:43

Hey all, first of all thanks for reading this post. as you can see i'm a noob at this, so let me get to the point. I have a horribly old laptop running Win98 and has 32 MB of RAM. I've been Internet searching and found DSL as the best OS to use on clunky laptops. I can boot the live disc but the desktop is is grainy and pixelated, using only the colors white and green. I can make out icons but can't read text. I've tried some boot options at the beginnning regarding Xvesa and fluxbox, but they haven't worked. (i used this post: < http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=431472 > on another forum as a reference, cuz this guy had the same problem). can anyone tell me how i can get it to work. it works on one of my other beast computers, so i know the cd's checksum is ok and all. plus, i am really not in the ballpark of upgrading the comp's hardware in any way.

thanks so much, matt.

Posted by roberts on Jan. 06 2007,22:00

Try booting like this:

boot: dsl vga=normal

or like this

boot: fb800x600

Note: the first one has dsl the second one does not.

Posted by whitechocolate on Jan. 06 2007,23:18

Thanks for the commands, but they were to no avail. After using each of them, I got the menu asking me to choose between xvesa and xfbdev, but after half an hour of trying different combos of options, such as color depth, resolution, and the like i got nowhere. here is the screen i get when i just press enter at the initial boot prompt:

and here is another screen i got as i was trying different options from the evesa/xfbdev menu:

do you know of anything else that will work? thanks SO MUCH.

Posted by roberts on Jan. 07 2007,04:45

Since you cannot read the screen very well, try this:

boot: dsl 2

At the root prompt type this:

# grep XDESC /etc/sysconfig/knoppix

Then post the results here.

It might be the case that you will need the full XFree86. But we do have a unc version which might work with such low memory.

But al least lets learn what type of video you possbily have.

Posted by whitechocolate on Jan. 07 2007,12:53

well, i for some reason the CD keeps stalling out after typing your above solution (roberts) but i was actulaly able to figure it out after looking at the menu again for a little while

for my computer at least, i typed (at the initial boot prompt)

dsl xsetup dsl vga=789

where 789 is the code for 16.7 mil colors at 800x600 resolution. Later in the boot, when prompted b/w xvesa and xfbdev, i chose xfbdev (press ok) and selected no USB mouse (i have a laptop), no imps/2 mouse, BUT i chose ps2 mouese (press ok) with 3 bttons, (press ok), and finally choose us keyboard and press ok.

*this is off the live cd and on a laptop, but i plan to boot off a hard drive in the future.

thanks roberts for your time, for now i'm good on the graphics portion of dsl (looks awesome!), just need to figure out that ethernet card...