Frederick Posted June 22, 2004 Report Share Posted June 22, 2004 Hi there, I have been using anna's rpms for Mdk10 and I encountered a few problems: 1- When trying the CD on a PIII 850 laptop with 128MB of RAM, I have issues with loading the whole directories (/home, /var, etc...) and I ultimatly can not load an X session. I can however load a command line session. (I use a 2.6.7 kernel). When I am doing the same on my bog standard AthlonXP1600+ with 256MB of RAM I have no problem. 2- When trying the CD on my father's Fujitsu-Siemens AthlonXP2600+ 512MB of RAM, it freezes trying to load a "reverse engineered driver" for the nForce chipset that is on the board (The computer runs FC2 quite happily). 3- When trying the CD on my sister's Fujitsu-Siemens laptop it hangs telling me that it tries to load swap partitions. I guess the CD is fine and that i only encounter freak problems, but they are still quite annoying. I was wondering I switching from the 2.6 to the 2.4 kernel would improve the problem number 1 in particular. The CD is less than 500MB and I run MDK10 with Gnome2.4, and a few apps including OpenOffice 1.1, XMMS and Mplayer for a total of about 1.1GB. [moved from Software by spinynorman] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
glennp Posted June 22, 2004 Report Share Posted June 22, 2004 The first thing i would look at is the kernel you are running.. is should be the 2.6.x-4 the one that came with the 10 ce. and you will need to get the Nvida drivers to load the video card for the nforce cards.. The 2.4.24 TMP kernel will work as well. good luck Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chris:b Posted June 23, 2004 Report Share Posted June 23, 2004 (1) 128 MB RAM (or maybe less because the onboard video card 'shares' ?) is not enough, I guess, for loading a 500 MB cd with all config files (depends how much is in your /etc dir), a full Gnome DE, and some more things like cups, samba, apache - depends on what is running on your LiveCD. - Example: I had a 240 MB (full KDE desktop) CD with no cups, no samba, no servers, booting on a 128 MB RAM box. I could start one instance of konqueror *or* 1 media player (kaffeine). But that was the limit. (2) The laptop with an nforce board might need the nforce modules to load, but I am not sure, what is included in kernel 2.6.7, and which kernel you are using. A precompiled cooker kernel? Your own compiled? Did you try to boot with livecd nonetwork or livecd nousb or livecd noscsi or livecd nodetect (or: livecd eth=<modulename>, or: livecd nosound) (3) On your sisters laptop: the livecd when booting tries to detect and configure all partitions that are on the hd, if there is a linux swap, it will use it. Is there a linux installation with swap? Building a livecd with kernel 2.6.7 you are on the bleeding edge ;-) Or a tester. 2.4.x should work better on most hardware, at the moment. Or try, as Glenn is suggesting, the 2.6.3-4mdk kernel from the community edition. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Frederick Posted June 23, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 23, 2004 My mistake, My kernel is in fact 2.6.3-7 :P , Got a bit carried away there :D Thanks for the comments, i will test that. Yes, there are linux partitions on all computers i tested the cd on. Do you reckon that if i used a desktop environment such as blackbox or icewm i would be able to run the CD on 128MB? I just want to create a CD that could be used by chemists (I am a chemist). When i try knoppix and the likes i can run the live distribution with only 128MB. Is the mklivecd fundamentally different from Knoppix ? My last question would be, is clp or squashfs best? Cheers Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chris:b Posted June 23, 2004 Report Share Posted June 23, 2004 Frederick, here we go :-) Give up on the 2.6.3.-7mdk kernel - go for the 2.6.3-4mdk (community) kernel. Should be available on the cooker/community ftp tree. Found something for your RAM problem, quote from the livecd-users list: Grumph wrote: > Hello, > > Been busy with making "my own livecd" for some days > with mklivecd :) and i'm stuck with a problem i can't > solve (yet, i hope). > > I have build the livecd on a 256M machine (the ram > amount that is) & tested it with success :). Tested it > with success on others 256M machines also. > > But when i test it on a 128M machine i get numerous > "cp : no space left on device" errors on boot. > I tried to play with some boot opts (mem=128M) : the > same. > > Is 256M a strict minimum tu run a livecd made with > mklivecd ? (or am i missing something obvious) > > Thanks > T. We discussed about this issue before (Texstar and I did). What you could do is to clean up homedir, especially ~/.galleon/mozilla/galeon/Cache and other directory in /etc that might take lotsa space. For example, I move gconf dir to /bin ;) and make a symlink. gconf takes like 20MB iirc. Secondly, fix the RAM size in linuxrc script. Look for this line RAMSIZE="$(expr $TOTALMEM / 5)" I set mine to / 3. YMMV. I am able to boot on machine with 64MB RAM even though it's deadly slow. Of course, more RAM always is better but not all could afford that. Good luck! -Larry Yes, a lighter DE will help you. You could try to download the SAM Live cd, MDK 10 with xfce and test it with 128 MB RAM: http://sam.hipsurfer.com/download.html I noticed too that knoppix and slax/slackware livecd are superior in 'eating ram'. Maybe the heavy Mandrake tools, or the apps with many dependencies, that's why some folk call MDK bloated. But I can't tell you exactly. You can try: cleaning up as much as possible, browser cache, home dir, wallpapers, sounds, services running in the background ... Good luck! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Frederick Posted June 24, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 24, 2004 (edited) OK, now I have no more problem with the short memory (using xfce4 and kernel 2.6.3-4mdk) on the laptop but i STILL have the activating swap problem and it even now appears on my laptop-it didn't use to do that. Basically, all loads well until the Mandrake boot sequence starts. It then prints the following message: Activating swap partitions [OK] and hangs. This really is the last problem on my list. Any ideas? Any way i could modify the init or linuxrc scripts so that the swap partitions or whatever is blocking my progress does not happen? Also, can it be due to the fact that i formatted my main partition as ReiserFS and not ext3? Ok, I just had a look on my desktop (256MB RAM) and it booted fine. The next item after the activation of swap is the activation of RAID devices. Does anyone know how to deactivate that or should i start thinking about building a custom kernel? Cheers Edited June 24, 2004 by Frederick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
glennp Posted June 24, 2004 Report Share Posted June 24, 2004 In mandrake you can turn off the swap file.. or swap partition.. This is what i had to do to get my working. you have to unmount and remove the swap from MMC the partition manager. then under service remove it as a service. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chris:b Posted June 24, 2004 Report Share Posted June 24, 2004 Did you try one of the bootcodes? Start with: livecd noscsi I know nothing about RAID, sorry. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Frederick Posted June 24, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 24, 2004 Thanks for the swap thing. But i can't find it in the Services menu of the Mandrake control center. Any idea where i could go to turn the swap activation off? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Frederick Posted June 24, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 24, 2004 Apparently it works with the livecd noscsi command at boot. I had it working on my sister's laptop for the first time! I got it to boot into Xmode on mine but i did not get xfce, it just stopped with the mouse cursor on the screen, still it is improvement. I guess 128MB is really too short. I will try to do a light-weight version that would be less than 250MB. Hope it is possible. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chris:b Posted June 24, 2004 Report Share Posted June 24, 2004 Let me guess: the RAID stuff and the 2.6.3 kernel don't like eachother . The noscsi bootoption: almost all livecd's which are built with a 2.6.x kernel (knoppix, mdk, suse) have this problem with detecting/loading usb and scsi. Before you build another even lighter iso, you should really try other bootoptions: livecd noscsi nousb nonetwork or: livecd nodetect (this is radical ;-) If you want your LiveCD being compatible and working with most laptops and hardware, a working 2.4.x kernel at the moment is better. Must be a reason, why Texstar still uses 2.4.x and the new Slackware 10.0 has it as default. Personally I'll start building new livecd when we reach kernel 2.6.10, when the mklivecd scripts are mantained, and someone (tmb) starts again with building a kernel for the mklivecd ;-) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chris:b Posted June 24, 2004 Report Share Posted June 24, 2004 Frederick, another idea. I keep forgetting that you are trying to boot a laptop. I am not familiar with these toys. The Fujitsu Siemens and Acer laptops at work I've tested my cds on were all happy But I remember that it could be a problem with the resolution of the display or the graphical card. The boodcodes to test are: livecd xres=<res> Specify the resolution for X. <res> can be one of 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024 or 1600x1400 ... livecd xbpp=<depth> Specify the bitdepth for X. <depth> can be one of 8, 15, 16, 24 or 32. livecd safex Don't allow our specified xbpp, xres result in an invalid configuration. If the user-specified resolution will not work for the current card, allow fallback to a safe detection default. You would have to boot like this: livecd noscsi xres=800x600 Depends on your Laptop ... i don't know your display Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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