Installation problem on very old laptop

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Yeti The Adi-Manav

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Mine is Toshiba Portege A100, running Win XP sp3 , Intel (m) centrino, 1.4 GHz, 750 mb ram, 120 gb hdd.
It has micro SD card reader, CD drive, USB ports
but boot can be done through CD, fdd,and hdd. And not from USB.

Because of old machine I got tips from Brickwizard and Kc1di to install MX and while I was trying it, I got message of missing PAE.

I added "/PAE" on boot.ini file but it still didn't work.

So Brickwizard suggested me to install AntiX as I have very old machine and no PAE.

While trying to install AntiX it asked me several question.
I stuck on user and password. When I wrote "root" for both, it said user name wrong. So I forced shut it down and I did it again. Second time same user and pw worked.

I have 3 partitions sda1 in ntfs, sda 5 and sda6 both on fat 32.
I choose following options :
no to repartition
No to separate home repartition
Yes to running AntiX-net
Yes to apt get update now.
But it failedtto connect to
ftp.de.debian.org and I got several other failed messages.

I am not being able to install it.
 
Last edited:


@MikeWalsh
morning buddy, you're our Puppy expert !. This OP has a non PAE laptop, I suggested Antix as they used to do a non PAE installation, which seems to still not work on his machine,
Do you think /Know if there is a Puppy that would work for him? If so, can you please talk him through it

Brian [Brickwizard]
 
Yeti wrote:
I have 3 partitions sda1 in ntfs, sda 5 and sda6 both on fat 32.
I choose following options :
no to repartition
No to separate home repartition
Click to expand...

Just on the matter of partitioning, if you wish to install linux it's far more efficient to repartition from the MS filesystems which appear, i.e. ntfs and fat32, to a linux filesystem such such ext4. In that case during installation, the installer of most distros have a partitioning tool which will repartition the drive and which the user is best advised to use for a linux installation. Usually the user is offered the choice of a default partitioning scheme in which case the user just needs to click on a button to accept that configuration, or, the installer will offer custom partitioning where the user can arrange the partitions. The option of "no to a separate home partition" is fine and won't get in the way of installation. What I've described is commonly the case, but I'm not familiar with the antix installer.
 
arochester said:
The Toshiba Portege A100 normally comes with 1Gb of RAM.
Click to expand...
That depends on how old and for what part of the world it was produced for, the Centrino 1.4 with 32 bit xp often only came with 250mb
 
Try Tahrpup if you are desperate, but don't trust my old brain, it's been a long time that puppy.
 
I first tried MX but it said you have non PAE machine

Then I tried Antix, I do not know what went wrong it didn't work. All messages come as "failed to ...."

Then I tried Sparky Linux 4.13 for non PAE machine. After installation it asked me to connect to net. But after connecting internet, it didn't function properly. Key board not working, mouse pad got very heavy and curser barely moved.

Then I aborted every thing and took out DVD, tried to run XP as normal but at this point one message popped up
"NTLDR is missing. Press Alt Ctrl Del to restart". Every time I restart the machine, same message pops up.

The problem is I can not even disable to boot from CD/DVD now.

So I again tried Sparky and this time I am being able to run Sparky installer. After half an hour it said system needs 1 gb ram.

After that I searched again and found puppy slacko 7.0 for non PAE machine and I tried to install it. And the message popped up "PAE missing"
Can you guys imagine, I reached at starting point again after seeing this message. And I thought All the distros are bullshit. All the above except MX is for very very old and for non pae machine. And it all said I need either 256 or 512 or 768 mb ram.

And all failed either on their promises on RAM or non PAE .

Today I found 1 gb and 2 gb DDR2 ram only. Tomorrow I will try again for at least one 1 gb ddr1 ram. I have 2 ram on the machine, one 256 mb pre-installed and 512mb that I added later on.
 
ML_113 said:
Try Tahrpup if you are desperate, but don't trust my old brain, it's been a long time that puppy.
Click to expand...
I will try that too, but which version?
tahr-6.0-CE_noPAE.iso
http://ftp.nluug.nl/ftp/pub/os/Linu...ahr/iso/tahrpup -6.0-CE/tahr-6.0-CE_noPAE.iso
this might be that you are talking about. But slacko and AntiX both that I tried were non PAE.

And desperation part. Yes definitely I am desperate. I do not know much about programming and all but I heard a lot about Linux. when I saw some articles about do not throw your old machine, instead try Linux on that, I tried my luck you know.

And what I learned from all this is
1. do not trust any distros until you install it yourself.
2. And all the people, who says do not throw away your old machine should cap the year ( what is old). Because there are people who bought their machines before your parents even conceived you. and their old might limit to their childhood. They can not even think beyond their birth. By this mine machine is not old but Ancient. :)
 
arochester said:
The Toshiba Portege A100 normally comes with 1Gb of RAM. It has 2 slots and can take a maximum of 4 Gb of RAM.

I believe the command is forcepae. E.g. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PAE
Click to expand...
Thanks for the suggestion. But I guess I need Lubuntu 14 or older for my machine to work. I found 16 or above of lubantu only while I searched on internet.

Besides I get the message "NTLDR is missing" every time I start the machine without any bootable DVD
 
Brickwizard said:
Means it's looking for a Windows NT bootloader , grub will have wiped it from the system when installing linux distributions
Click to expand...
I do not remember now but after win 98 I used win nt and win 2000 pro.

So shall I install win NT. I found it on winworldpc.com
 
Yeti The Adi-Manav said:
So shall I install win NT. I found it on winworldpc.com
Click to expand...
Win 3, 95,97, & I believe millennium were Dos based, NT was original for Windows server, EX was the first desktop based on it as are most subsequent builds, so I would say no
 
@Brickwizard :-

Sorry I wasn't around this morning. Busy, busy, busy today. You know how it is......

One thing that's occurred to me. Yes, Puppy did used to have some non-PAE builds, although of course that's kernel-related; with modern Puppies being built along modular lines, and our 'archivist', Ally, having virtually every kernel ever built for Puppy squirrelled away in the Puppy archives at archive.org, it's an easy matter to swap to a non-PAE kernel these days.

Anyways; this is Centrino, yes? And if I don't miss my guess, that means Pentium M. Which means it's either 'Banias' or the later 'Dothan' core, yes? I'm betting matey has got the older 'Banias' core here, and I'll tell you why. Both cores do in fact recognise the difference between PAE/non-PAE, but for some strange reason Intel built the earlier CPU to not advertise its capabilities to any system probing utilities. The older core requires the use of the

Code: 
-- forcepae

.....flag on the kernel line - regardless of the kernel you're trying to boot! - and then it behaves just like the newer core. At least, I believe that's the way it's supposed to work...

DON'T forget the space between the hyphens and 'forcepae'. This is unneeded under Puppy, but for Deban/Ubuntu-based distros the kernel is built to expect to see the space with this flag. Don't ask me why!

This was all to do with the NX-bit feature Intel/AMD et al were starting to add to their CPUs.....and NX-bit requires PAE support in order to function.

'Banias' supports PAE internally, but doesn't report that fact via its CPUID command when queried. The following is a 13 yr-old thread over at ServerFault, but even around the time of Centrino's release the issue was already annoying people!

serverfault.com

What processors do/do not support PAE?

I'm doing some research, and trying to find out if any processors do not support PAE that are currently being used. Wikipedia has a short list (Pentium M, Celeron M, Pentium PRO... I found this list
serverfault.com serverfault.com

This is one thing I'm well aware of, 'cos we've had a ton of potential Puppy users asking this very same question over the years.....and I've lost track of the number of times I've explained this.

(*shrug*)


Mike. ;)
 
Last edited:
Yeti The Adi-Manav said:
I will try that too, but which version?
tahr-6.0-CE_noPAE.iso
http://ftp.nluug.nl/ftp/pub/os/Linux/distr/puppylinux/puppy-tahr/iso/tahrpup -6.0-CE/tahr-6.0-CE_noPAE.iso
this might be that you are talking about. But slacko and AntiX both that I tried were non PAE.

And desperation part. Yes definitely I am desperate. I do not know much about programming and all but I heard a lot about Linux. when I saw some articles about do not throw your old machine, instead try Linux on that, I tried my luck you know.

And what I learned from all this is
1. do not trust any distros until you install it yourself.
2. And all the people, who says do not throw away your old machine should cap the year ( what is old). Because there are people who bought their machines before your parents even conceived you. and their old might limit to their childhood. They can not even think beyond their birth. By this mine machine is not old but Ancient. :)
Click to expand...

6.0.5
 
I've run Tahrpup 6.0.5 entirely successfully under an even older Pentium 4 (@2.6 GHz) and a gig of DDR1 RAM (a 2002 Dell Inspiron 1100). It's a very good Puppy, and was the first to boot fully to desktop on that same machine, without the need for any arcane kernel-line "incantations".

(I tell a lie. I DID need to employ

Code: 
i915.modeset=0

.....on the kernel line, to counteract the weird side-effects generated by the 'Brookedale' graphics core in the 82845 chipset. Basically, to disable the ridiculous thing, and drop back to VESA.......otherwise, the desktop was jammed up into the top-left corner of the screen).

Aside from that, it ran smooth as silk......and was only finally "put out to pasture" just a few months ago. The graphics adapter's display connector eventually broke, where it runs up through the left-hand hinge; frankly, I'm amazed it lasted as long as it did. I expected it to give up the ghost years ago.


Mike. :p
 
Last edited:
MikeWalsh said:
@Brickwizard :-

Sorry I wasn't around this morning. Busy, busy, busy today. You know how it is......

One thing that's occurred to me. Yes, Puppy did used to have some non-PAE builds, although of course that's kernel-related; with modern Puppies being built along modular lines, and our 'archivist', Ally, having virtually every kernel ever built for Puppy squirrelled away in the Puppy archives at archive.org, it's an easy matter to swap to a non-PAE kernel these days.

Anyways; this is Centrino, yes? And if I don't miss my guess, that means Pentium M. Which means it's either 'Banias' or the later 'Dothan' core, yes? I'm betting matey has got the older 'Banias' core here, and I'll tell you why. Both cores do in fact recognise the difference between PAE/non-PAE, but for some strange reason Intel built the earlier CPU to not advertise its capabilities to any system probing utilities. The older core requires the use of the

Code: 
-- forcepae

.....flag on the kernel line - regardless of the kernel you're trying to boot! - and then it behaves just like the newer core. At least, I believe that's the way it's supposed to work...

DON'T forget the space between the hyphens and 'forcepae'. This is unneeded under Puppy, but for Deban/Ubuntu-based distros the kernel is built to expect to see the space with this flag. Don't ask me why!

This was all to do with the NX-bit feature Intel/AMD et al were starting to add to their CPUs.....and NX-bit requires PAE support in order to function.

'Banias' supports PAE internally, but doesn't report that fact via its CPUID command when queried. The following is a 13 yr-old thread over at ServerFault, but even around the time of Centrino's release the issue was already annoying people!

serverfault.com

What processors do/do not support PAE?

I'm doing some research, and trying to find out if any processors do not support PAE that are currently being used. Wikipedia has a short list (Pentium M, Celeron M, Pentium PRO... I found this list
serverfault.com serverfault.com

This is one thing I'm well aware of, 'cos we've had a ton of potential Puppy users asking this very same question over the years.....and I've lost track of the number of times I've explained this.

(*shrug*)


Mike. ;)
Click to expand...
@MikeWalsh
I am no programmer and nothing I do know about all these, but as I said to @Brickwizard in another thread, I wanted to learn all these. And my first step towards this is to install Linux on my very old machine.

Yes processor is Centrino.
Intel (R) Pentium (R) M Processor 1400MHz

For PAE to enable I tried to include /PAE on boot.ini file, it didn't work. Then I realized if my hardware does not support, how hard I try my luck on changing registry, it will not work. I even considered once to change the whole boot.ini file and another to include "forcepae -- forcepae".
I will definitely try -- forcepae as well after my first successful installation to change to Debian based distro.

I will try puppy 6 as you suggested. I will definitely overcome this problem and I might be able to suggest others in future based on my experience as well. :)

And thanks for the suggestion.

I have one HP win 10 AMD Ryzen 5 5500u 8 gb ram as well. But my wife's gonna kill me if she won't be able to use this as she used to working on windows. After I get confidence on working on Linux I will explain her and switch this machine to Ubuntu.
 
Dear @MikeWalsh , @Brickwizard , @ML_113 @osprey @arochester and @kc1di

I got stuck between all these.

I successfully boot Puppy Tahrpup 6.0 from CD and installed it on sda 1 ( instead of sda 5, and 6) which was my drive c, I guess.
After installation on hdd my CD/dvd got ejected. And I felt relieved. And after this I boot ( restart) it again without any cd, but first messages I see:
Intel boot agent FE v4.1.09 copyright to Intel Client Mac ADDR: 00 08 0D 80 14 DB GUID: fffff fffff etc

And
Guess what
I saw AntiX installation process instead of Puppy Tahrpup

And will lots of fir last line is like this:

Failed to mount /dev/sda5 as root file system (initramfs) ( 195.722592) random:crng init done
Below this curser is blinking as if to smiling at me in sarcastic way. :(
 
I guess my problem is: puppy is in sada1, along with windows registry if any, and AntiX on sda5.

And I do not know how to clean sda 5 and to boot system at start up from sda1 instead of DVD/cd
 
When you made your installation, did you finalise it??
This is done by removing the disc/pendrive when instructed, the installed version will then clean up the installation and shut down it should boot without the disc thereafter.
If your not keeping windows on that machine, then start again when asked, select use complete drive [or similar] and use let the installer partition my drive [or similar] just make sure you have saved everything you need to keep to an external drive or disc first
 
Use the Puppy in your CD to install Grub4Dos (into sda)
or use Gparted , also in your pup CD, to erase everything and start from scratch.
 
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