Puppy 3.00 runs on the $0 Laptop

Steven, if Xorg is working on Puppy, but not Slackware, just try copying the working xorg.conf from Puppy over to Slackware. Odds are that will fix Slackware's problems. If it does, you can then compare the non-working Slackware xorg.conf to the working one from Puppy and see what's causing/fixing the problems.

I couldn't even get it to come up with a console. Could it be a frame buffer problem?

> I couldn't even get it to come up with a console. Could it be a frame buffer problem?

Hmm. It would just about have to be the display mode of the console. I think Slackware only uses the framebuffer for X, but it allows you to set a modified screen mode during the setup stage. Does the install CD/DVD boot to a command prompt at all?

It installed fine -- I went all the way through. But then when the CD ejects and I reboot into Slack, the screen goes blank before the login comes up. And Slack starts with a console login, so something fishy is happening. Yesterday I couldn't even get Puppy started ... it died when X started loading. Guess I had one lucky day ...

Slackware doesn't do any installation-stage configuration of X for anything beyond the FB. If you want to use faster drivers for your card, it's up to you to configure it after installation completes.

If X is giving you a hard time, I suggest making sure it will at least boot into single-user mode. In Slackware, type "Linux S" at the LILO prompt. If you can get a login prompt, log in as root and try "xf86cfg" to view and adjust your current configuration. (Solaris mis-detected my primary card on my multi-head system, and that's how I rescued it.)

Thanks everybody. I had a better day with Puppy 3.00 so far. The hardware detection of Puppy continues to be one of its greatest assets. I'm running 1024 x 768, no problems.

I think most of the problem is that this 5-year-old Gateway laptop isn't the best piece of hardware I've ever come across. Still and all, the best "fit" on this laptop so far has been Ubuntu and Debian, in that order.

Adding two laptops, and aging ones at that, to my roster has only made me appreciate desktop machines more. They take more abuse, don't fall apart as easily, are cheaper and also can be easily repaired. But you all know that already.

Steven:

> But then when the CD ejects and I reboot into Slack, the screen goes blank before the login comes up.

Yes, you're right, something strange is going on. Did you configure any custom fonts and/or screen settings when those options came up? The fonts are set in /etc/rc.d/rc.font and the custom screen settings are set in /etc/lilo.conf (you'll have to rerun lilo or your setup to change these). Those are the only things I can think of which might be affecting the console.

If you're booting into a normal console, your lilo.conf should have an uncommented entry for vga=normal and none of the other vga modes should be uncommented. For the default fonts, your rc.font should just have a setfont -v with no additional options.

Steven, I made a bad assumption: that you were booting into runlevel 4, with X login. Oops. (Unless you somehow set it up to do that before the first boot.) Slackware goes to runlevel 3 by default, until you edit /etc/inittab to change this.

You can disable font loading with "chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.font"... if you can somehow get to a command prompt.