ZenWalk and the art of not booting
I really wanted to install ZenWalk 4.6.1, but it was not to be. Add it to the list of distros that won't boot on my test machine, the VIA C3 1 GHz thin client. I don't quite understand it, because Slackware 12 boots (with the huge.s kernel), as does Vector Linux 5.8. So I shrunk my Slackware partition just enough to squeeze Vector Standard on there again.
One thing I can say about Vector, I like its install. Everything was very clear in the menus, the hardware detection and configuration were flawless, and I had a working system on my partition pretty quick.
Since on this drive I already had Xubuntu/Ubuntu and Slackware booting from GRUB on separate partitions, I didn't want to change to LILO for my bootloader. During my last Vector install, LILO didn't pick up my Ubuntu partition, and I know nothing about the bootloader but can generally fake my way through a GRUB configuration. So I skipped that part of the Vector install, did a bit of Googling and found out how to get the new distro onto /boot/grub/menu.lst in Ubuntu.
The GRUB info for Vector wasn't easy to find -- and I didn't figure it out from the Vector site. Instead, a forum for Arch Linux provided me with the GRUB lines I needed.
I like Vector. It looks nice, there's a good mix of software, but again, I didn't detect any speed improvements over either Slackware or Xubuntu. I don't exactly have a lot of room to play with, having three distros on a 14.4 GB hard drive, so huge downloads of ISOs and the like are pretty much out of the question until I clear out one of the partitions.
There was one glitch: Vector didn't recognize my troublesome USB flash drive. It has an advertising CD image on it, and my Mac won't recognize it either. Debian, Ubuntu and Puppy Linux have no problem with it, but in Slack-based distros, I either get the fake CD-ROM part (which usually mounts as sr0) and not the flash portion (sda). Or I get nothing at all.
I really wanted to run ZenWalk, but Vector beat it out by actually booting. Before the install, I used the trusty Puppy 2.14 live CD to repartition the drive. I'm always amazed by the sheer speed of Puppy's JWM desktop, ROX filer and all-RAM way of running.
My rambling post from yesterday got a comment from Wolfgang of The Debian User, saying it was obvious which distro I should be using. He didn't mean just Debian, but other distros derived from it as well. My enthusiasm for Xubuntu was dampened by probably my fourth unrecoverable crash in two days while running Synaptic. Ctrl-alt-backspace wouldn't kill X. Ctrl-alt-delete wouldn't reboot either. I had to hard-boot with the power switch). What gives? It's Xubuntu 7.04. Maybe I need to get back to 6.06 LTS?. I also had a similar crash in Slackware when switching between tabs in Konqueror. Is it the motherboard? The hard drive? Maybe the OS itself?
So I powered down and connected my Debian 4.0 drive. All that's on it is Debian and a pup_save file for Puppy. I ran Synaptic for some updates, and it worked perfectly. So it's not the hardware (but maybe the hard drive).
For some reason, AbiWord was broken in Debian. Synaptic said it was there, but Abi would load from the menu or a terminal window. So at the terminal I did apt-get install abiword. Apt didn't think it was there, so it downloaded and installed it. Now Abi works. Go figure.
I also installed the Xfce desktop and a bunch of related Xfce stuff. Xfce works great in Debian. However, all the little eye-candy things that I also installed -- CPU frequency monitor, weather monitor, etc. -- didn't show up. I'm not well-versed (or versed at all) in modifying Xfce, so I'll have to investigate that later.
It's time to do a month-long Debian test. All I have to do is clear the Puppy, SimplyMepis and Slackware reviews off my plate, plus my more-general series of technology tutorials for new college students ... and I'm on vacation next week.
And I still haven't cracked open the powerless Gateway Solo 1450 laptop and see if I can solder it back to life. I should at least crack the memory door open and see what's in there. A 512 MB SO-DIMM would probably be enough motivation for me to get the jewelers screwdrivers out.
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Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steve,
thanks for mentioning our site.
As to your Abiword problem: I didn't have it installed on my box, so I couldn't confirm your experience.
I haven't read too much of your blog until now, but I think you are interested in thin client computing?
Debian developer Edd Dumbill had an interesting article today on planet.debian.org about the "Zonbu", a solid state machine using a distributed network (Amazon S3) as storage - very interesting if you have to access your data from all over the world.
His blog entry about it is at:
http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/08/04-zonbu
A very similar device (the Linutop, with storage on local USB) was mentioned by me earlier on
http://wolfgang.lonien.de/?p=314
The Zonbu runs Gentoo, the Linutop runs Debian. Consuming 9 and 6W, these devices are really interesting.
I bookmarked your interesting blog site. Thanks for sharing your experiences.
Kind regards,
Wolfgang
http://wolfgang.lonien.de/
http://blog.thedebianuser.org/
about the Gateway Solo 1450:
Have you removed the keyboard?
correction
just visited the zenwalk site, their distro is i686 optimized, but i see their statement that it is i486 compatible. i do not want to leave an incorrect post with erroneous info. zenwalk is a nice distro, that i have used it in the past.
i had a 4.6 version lying around, and it booted and attempted to install. ultimately it failed, because of scratches on the media or a flaky cdrom drive. all of my 'marginal' devices end life in this box before they are recycled.
there are issues regarding the c3 and gcc and i686 kernels. that i discovered while trying to install arch linux on my box.
http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch/2004-December/002941.html
so keep in mind that you may need at least an i486 kernel and at most, an i586 kernel in order to boot. my fedora and debian experience on this box confirms there is an issue with the c3/i686 in this box.
that said, slack is nice on this machine. i am currently running absolute 12.0.1 on the box (slack+icewm) and it is a little more respectable, performance-wise.
It turns out that not all VIA C3 processors are created equal. The newer Nehemiah is i686 compatible, but the Samuel, which I have, doesn't support an instruction called CMOV, and hence won't work with i686-level programming. I've seen pages on how to get the Samuel to work with Gentoo, but it appears that anything Red Hat-based is out of the question.
All the more reason to move my testing to the Gateway Solo 1450 laptop (Celeron or Pentium M, I believe). That and the Gateway's 1 GB memory ceiling, as opposed to the 256 MB of my ECS motherboard. I wish the Gateway had a quicker bus, but that's still stuck at 133 MHz.
I have Ubuntu/Xubuntu 7.04, Slackware 12 and Vector Standard (unsure of release, but it's the latest one) triple-booting at the moment. The fact that I've solved most of the major issues I've faced in Slackware -- and learned something each and every time -- makes me want to stick with it and learn the package-management system that it uses.
That said, I wonder which word-processing program to use in the Xfce environment. It seems wrong to be relying on KOffice without KDE, and OpenOffice is way too heavy. I think I'm going to stick with AbiWord. I've grown quite attached to Mousepad and even Thunar in the Xfce environment. Lately I've been thinking that I need something more than Fluxbox, and Xfce is filling that role.
That said, on a "modern" box, Slackware with the KDE desktop must run really, really well. And so must everything else.
Wolfgang, thanks for your kind words (I'm managing the comments and had the opportunity to read your comment again). I'm very interested in thin-client computing, both on wired, in-house networks and with apps/data distributed over the Internet. Both the Zonbu and Linutop are intriguing, and I'd love to try one. I think that's the direction we're going in, for sure.
what happend to the gateway solo? my solo (1450) has been dead for at least a year now... all it dose is show the charging light... even when the battery is taken out... idk what happened to it...if any one can find out a way to fix it (without major sh*t like sodering) then please e-mail me at stargate93@msn.com...
The Gateway Solo 1450 is about to get its second chance at life. As you may remember, the power jack had been shattered -- literally. It was soldered to the motherboard with no other provision for strain relief. I bought a direct replacement (thanks, eBay) for the power jack, but after removing about 30 screws, I still couldn't get anywhere near close to even getting the case all the way apart, let alone pulling the motherboard so I could remove the remaining pieces and install the new power jack.
I thought that I might just solder wires to the top of the board and lead them to a 3.5-mm earphone plug, then either change the jack on the power adapter or make up an adapter box.
But the other day, I found a replacement 2.1-mm DC power plug that is designed to screw into a 1/4-inch mounting hole. Not concidentially, there's a plastic knockout on the back of the Gateway Solo 1450 -- for what, I have no idea -- but it will become my new power plug as soon as I get the chance. I found my soldering iron and other soldering tools yesterday, and as soon as I get a chance I am going to rewire the power plug, put a hard drive into the thing and see if it boots.
I did check out the memory. The thing actually shipped with 128 MB of RAM. With Windows XP. How did that ever run? Must've been a struggle, for sure. If I ever do get the thing to power up, I'll have to look for new memory (PC133 SODIMM). It's pretty expensive, so I'll be back on eBay looking for deals on 512 MB sticks (it maxes out at 1 GB. Who ever heard of shipping a computer that maxes out at 1 GB with 128 MB?)