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Instinct
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Joined: 02 Aug 2002
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 10, 2002 10:45 pm    Post subject: Installing on a fast pc for a slow system Reply with quote

How well does this work? I have a Javelin touchscreen pc running FreeBSD with X right now and while it works just fine, I can't get the touchscreen to work with FreeBSD at all. When I use xsetpointer to specify the touch device it just hardlocks. I have no floppy for the machine, nor can I hook up a cd-rom. So I was thinking, if I open it up and put the drive in my main system, and install Gentoo with the appropriate compile flags for the touchscreen, I should be able to put the drive back in the LPC and have it boot up and be working. True or false?

And if true, what issues might I run into? The LPC is very limited, 5x86 133, 16MB RAM. The NIC is also built in as an ISA card (NE2000 Compat). All it does is run X w/ blackbox and ssh to another pc to give me control of XMMS. FreeBSD is very 'low-end friendly' and performance is acceptable for what it does. Would Gentoo have problems confined to those limited specs? Is it difficult to setup a non-pnp ISA card in linux?

Eitherway I'm not looking forward to doing this, and I'm really annoyed that it hardlocks now when trying to utilize the touch device. Installing FreeBSD on this little thing was no picnic either. :) Just looking for some other input before I commit to doing this....
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rac
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Joined: 30 May 2002
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 10, 2002 10:55 pm    Post subject: Re: Installing on a fast pc for a slow system Reply with quote

Instinct wrote:
I should be able to put the drive back in the LPC and have it boot up and be working. True or false?

True, and there are several threads that discuss this in the forum archives, although it is admittedly a subject for which finding good search terms is rather difficult.

Quote:
Would Gentoo have problems confined to those limited specs? Is it difficult to setup a non-pnp ISA card in linux?

I don't think I ever had any less than 64MB of RAM in it, but P133 describes what was my main Linux desktop machine for 3+ years, and it now runs Gentoo just fine. I have never used FreeBSD, however, so I can't comment on a comparison. I'm sure someone else will come along and chime in on this front. Probably several someones.
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rhialto
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 11, 2002 1:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Instinct wrote:
Would Gentoo have problems confined to those limited specs? Is it difficult to setup a non-pnp ISA card in linux?


I cannot say for Gentoo 1.2 or 1.4 but I've had Gentoo 1.1 running on a P75 with only 12M RAM. Of course without X :) I used the system as gateway, nameserver, fileserver, printserver and timeserver in my homenet (which is indeed small, only 2 clients). Anyway, all the commandline tools don't need that much resources. When you are using X (which i suppose you do for your touch screen) I would also recommend 32-64M at the minimum...

Have fun!

Rhialto

PS. Just curious, but has anyone had Gentoo running on an even more lightweight system than my P75? I remember having Debian on a 386 with only 4M, but that was in the time of the 2.0 kernel :P
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Instinct
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PostPosted: Fri Sep 13, 2002 12:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, I tried it. What a nightmare it has become. Looks like I had XFree 3.3 on the freebsd install. Oh and to clarify this is an AMD 5x86 133... aka 486dx4. I can't upgrade from 16megs of ram because it only has one simmslot and the biggest simms I have are 16meg.

Anyway, it did work for the most part... it's SLOW... everything is just slow to load but my main problem comes from xfree and the video. The video adaptor is a chips type... 655xx, when useing the chips driver the screen just scrolls really fast like a bad tv with a broken vsync. I've tried all the options, couple different modelines, nothing will work. I once managed to get it to stay still but the screen position was shifted up about 2 inches. (of course I lost this and can't reproduce it) While it was like this it seemed fast enough meaning if I could get it to display correctly I'd be just fine. The only way to get it looking normal is to use the standard vesa driver, but then there is no window acceleration so it's crazy slow, and locks the machine when exiting X. Aragh!

And havn't even been able to get to trying to get the touch device to work, and with such special hardware I can't find any support for these problems anyway. How come Xfree 3.3 isn't part of portage? (Probably asked before but for the life of me I can't figure out how to search for version numbers) This display had no issues with the chips driver for 3.3, which was included in the svga lib.

Sorry guess this is more of a rant than anything else. It just drives me nuts everytime I think of what I'm going to do I always run into some crazy problems. Going back to FreeBSD/XFree 3.3 and forgetting about having a touchscreen is always an option I suppose. I think I'll just shut it off and get outside for awhile. If anyone has any kind of input on this whole situation I wouldn't mind hearing it. :)
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