DeLi Linux Wiki

DO NOT THROW AWAY YOUR OLD LAPTOP
Old computer still runs as STAND ALONE DESKTOP no need master-slave systems like LTSP;
This is an old Toshiba Satellite 4020CDT 133MHz 32M RAM HD 4G running Deli Linux 0.8.0 + IceWM;
compared with Hewlett-Packard Tablet Compac 2710p running Ubuntu Studio 9.10;
and me (EstiyanD) + bad hair, should have hair cut…
Use Xorg x-server configuration
for mouse using P/S2 and /dev/psaux ||||| estiyand@gmail.com - Indonesia

This Pentium 166MHz laptop was made circa 1997, I recently bought 3 or 4 of them to do some custom programming work on Motorola HT1000s.

The system specs are:

Pentium 166 96mb RAM 30gb disk

I installed using CDROM (booted from same)

I have been able to get a Cisco Aironet 340 PCMCIA card working (although manual for now) using the following configuration in /etc/rc.d/pcmcia

  # Slackware startup options go right here:
  # Should be either i82365 or tcic
  PCIC=yenta_socket
  # PCIC=i82365
  # Put socket driver timing parameters here
  PCIC_OPTS=
  # Put pcmcia_core options here
  CORE_OPTS=
  # Put cardmgr options here
  CARDMGR_OPTS=
  # To set the PCMCIA scheme at startup...
  SCHEME=

 [snip]
Linux Kernel Card Services 3.1.22
options:  [pci] [cardbus] [pm]
PCI: Assigned IRQ 11 for device 00:13.0
PCI: Assigned IRQ 11 for device 00:13.1
Yenta ISA IRQ mask 0x0698, PCI irq 11
Socket status: 30000450
Yenta ISA IRQ mask 0x0698, PCI irq 11
Socket status: 30000046
cs: IO port probe 0x0c00-0x0cff: clean.
cs: IO port probe 0x0100-0x04ff: excluding 0x220-0x22f 
    0x330-0x337 0x378-0x37f 0x388-0x38f 0x398-0x39f 0x3e0-0x3e7 0x4d0-0x4d7
cs: IO port probe 0x0a00-0x0aff: excluding 0xaf8-0xaff
cs: memory probe 0xa0000000-0xa0ffffff: clean.
airo:  Probing for PCI adapters
airo:  Finished probing for PCI adapters
airo: Doing fast bap_reads
airo: MAC enabled eth0 0:40:96:31:42:73
eth0: index 0x05: Vcc 5.0, Vpp 5.0, irq 3, io 0x0100-0x013f
Setting key 0
airo:  WEP_PERM set 12106

I used /dev/psaux for the mouse device in X but unable to get the screen to reset back to text mode when exiting the server. I am unable to get Tiny X working thus far. The standard X server is functioning other thn resetting back to text.

The hardware device (frame buffer) was set to “neomagic” which works well.

(will update this later)

Terminus – New Mexico, US

This Pentium 133MMX laptop was made in 1998 and when I got it was running Windows 98 with 48MB of RAM.

I have upgraded the RAM to a maximum of 80MB.

The system does not have a CD-ROM so I used the floppy installation disks and delinet install to get a basic system, then deliget for the other aplications I needed. The laptop has a Cardbus slot so I was able to get PCMCIA services on the install diskette and later configure the machine to start up the PC Ethernet card and DHCP upon boot-up. I connect to a gateway and cable modem.

I am running Tiny-Xserver with the Vesa driver and IceWM to get a nice graphical desktop. There's plenty of memory to run Firefox 1.5 and Gnumeric so I installed both.

I had to install the OSS soundblaster SB module manually to get sound working but now it's OK.

Deli Linux is the only distro out there that would have installed this well and given such a pleasurable result. Thank you!

Ray MacDonald Almonte ON Canada

I've had this computer in the garage for so long, and had no clue what to do with it. It ran Windows 95 on a Pentium MMX, and only had about eight megabytes of RAM. One day, I decided to install Linux on it! Just like that. Out of the blue. I pretty much wanted to give up the installation after trying Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Puppy Linux, Damn Small Linux, and probably a few other distributions. None of them worked.

Then I found DeLi Linux. I was a little hesitant about trying it, because there was no LiveCD, but I erased the partitions, and it installed successfully! I did add another partition, though, as 256 MB swap space.

Thanks to all you guys! Matthew Mikolay

My Toshiba 430CDS has 48 MB of Ram and a 3Com 3C574-TX “Fast EtherLink 16-Bit PC Card” and I had success installing Delili GNU/Linux. While this short statement is not a install complete report like some of the http://www.venturas.org/t430cds.html other detailed information on the same computer it may help others with similar hardware.

I used a boot floppy to assist the computer to recognize and utilize the install CD. Further information on Smart BootManager may be found at http://btmgr.sourceforge.net.

The CD install worked right away giving me a graphical user interface the first time I issued startx.

I edited a few files from the command line to get the internet card going:

Added pcmcia in the last line of /etc/rc.conf now it has SERVICES=“pcmcia”

Added ” sleep 10 ” to the forth line of /etc/rc.d/net

Added i82365 to the PCIC= found on line 38 of /etc/rc.d/pcmcia so now it has PCIC=i82365

Starting it now involves login as root, ”/etc/rc.d/net start”, and logout.

I setup a normal user with the root user command “adduser” and set up the window manager with “xwmconfig” as that user.

Dan Hunt St. Brieux Saskatchewan Canada

This is an outline about my experience installing DeLi on a two very old Compaq Armada 1530D laptops. These are Pentium 133MHz machines with 1.2Gb HD, 48Mb ram and floppy, non-bootable CDROM and two PCMCIA slots. I have a D-Link DWL-G650 wireless card installed (Madwifi driver - see my post on this in the forums).

I had previously installed Damn Small Linux on one of these machines but gave up for two reasons:

a) DSLs Tiny-X windows drivers (Xvesa or Xfbdev) would refuse to work with the Cirrus Logic chips on this machine and I would get the screen looking like a photo negative.

b) I could only use DSL 2.1b and not upgrade to the more recent ones because DSL had reverted to an older version of cardmgr in later versions which would not work with the wifi card on this machine.

I burnt the latest version on DeLi on CD, got a floppy with SmartBootManager on it and then booted off floppy to allow me to then boot off the CDROM image. Installation was easy with no problems.

I initially tried the Tiny X server with the Xvesa setting but this gave me the same problems as DSL (photo negative screen). I changed this to Xfbdev Xorg at 800×600 and 8 bits, Cirrus GD754X chipset, Vesa screen, icewm manager and the desktop came up fine (256 colours). Tried other combinations up to 16 bits but they would not work. Apparently XFree86 3.3 can work with this in 16bpp mode but I did not try this. The supplied Xorg server would not work at all otherwise works fine.

I have replaced the KonqE browser with Firefox from the Deli32 ports. IceWM menu was updated for Firefox by editing the menu.conf file in .icewm directory under home.

Autostartup of PCMCIA services was done by adding “modprobe carmgr” in the /etc/rc.local file and then adding all the madwifi startup commands in the same file.

Occasionally, PCMCIA wifi card would lock up and freeze the PC but ejecting and re-inserting the card would fix this. I think this is either due to card services or Madwifi Not sure what causes this as similar problems occur with a fixed ethernet PCMCIA card. I tried to update pcmcia-cs to 3.2.8 but am not sure this worked as dmesg output still showed cardservices as 3.1.22. More investigation appeared to show that this lockup problem was due to insufficient processor power. When CPU load was too high (eg running XMMS or web page having too many animations), the wifi card locked up the system.

Sound was activated by putting “modprobe sb” in the /etc/rc.local file but this resulted in an interrupt conflict. I then experimented with assigning other interrupts by setting “modprobe sb irq=n” where n was set to any free interrupts found by typing “cat /proc/interrupts”. Interrupt 9 worked.

XMMS now works with 128kbps MP3s (just) if no other applications are running.

The 256 colour limit prevents me from seeing any photos using gtksee but Firefox seems to work OK if you put the address of the folder where the photos are, eg,

file://mnt/cdrom/

as the URL. Xpaint also works but results in high processor load with digicam photos.

Power management (APM) also seems to work OK as long as I do a “modprobe apm” at boot. I can then hit the power button anytime and the PC goes into standby. The wireless connection is not lost when I restore which is also quite good.

All in all the machine runs well on DeLi and allows me to web-browse, play music, check e-mails, do simple documents and handle a wireless connection so I am quite happy.

emmakez

I have this old IBM Thinkpad which uses 14 MB RAM (4MB + 8MB) with a 480×620 screen and has been sitting around as junk lately. I removed Windows 98 which crashes often and tried to install DeLi. With the external floppy drive broken and the CD drive not bootable, I couldn't do anything at first. Then an idea of LiveCD Installations hit me.

I took out the hard disk, transplanted it to my friend's Toshiba Satellite and installed DeLi on the disk. I had to make sure the LiLo geometry (layout of disks) was as close as possible by rearranging the Primary/Slave dive jumpers. Once done, I transfered the disk back into the Thinkpad and it runs nicely. I needed to reconfigure lots of things such as the X Window but it all worked out in the end.

The disk checking was slow but that was mainly due to the disk's speed. The sound card does not work but everything else works fine. The speed was not very fast but at least a lot faster than Windows 98.

DeLi works like a charm and nice to use.

Lee

This report will be very brief.

The 370C came standard with only 4MB of RAM. However, the one I was given, by a person who had been planning to throw it out, had 8MB of RAM, so I decided to try DeLi Linux on it. Unsurprisingly, given its age, the computer had no optical drive or USB port, just a floppy disk drive and a hard disk drive.

I was able to install the basic DeLi Linux packages on it via the null modem method and haary also gave me instructions in the Installation forum on how to install the non-base packages via null modem as well.

The computer used the WD90C24A chipset in its video adapter and so I used the xf86_336-server package in order to run X.

The computer had 2 PCMCIA ports, but they were of the 16-bit type. I had a 3com Ethernet card of that vintage and it did work with DeLi Linux.

However, in the end, I will not be using the computer, because it ran too slowly in X.

I will now try to use DeLi Linux with another old computer given to me by the same person who gave me the 370C. The second computer has 16MB of RAM and I hope that it will run at an acceptable speed in X.

Leslie

At first here are the hardware specs:

CPU : Pentium I (75, 100 or 120 MHz - depends on jumper settings)

RAM : 8M installed onboard, extensible by four more slots (64M or more possible)

GRAPHICS : afaik only 2M, also onboard

DISPLAY : just a standard 17 inch CRT

HDD : using a 639M WD Caviar

other Drives : FDD and a quad-speed CD-Drive

NETWORK : one Realtek-NIC mounted in the single PCI-slot

other stuff : four ISA-slots (unused), a 145W power supply

Preparation

This nice old desktop box has an interesting and very useful overview chart sticking “under the hood”, on top of the floppy and cd-drive case, showing the layout of the mainboard and especially the position of the jumpers you have to set in the first place.

Another important thing is to download and write the two Compaq F10-setup-and-diagnosis disks (it's one Windows-executable file - just search for the model on hp.com, it's not that hard to find) in order to gain access to the BIOS-settings of this computer. Without these you cannot set time/date or even see the current cpu speed! The first one is a MSDOS bootdisk with even a mouse- controllable, (quite nice) graphic menu to do the needed settings. The second one is mainly for diagnostic reasons.

Installation

After increasing the cpu setting from 75 MHz to an amazing speed of 120 MHz and discovering that the fanless cooling unit does not get hot at all (not even warm) I downloaded and prepared the three bootdisks and used them to boot the system. Only the first two disks were needed for booting a small shell in order to prepare the harddisk with cfdisk and start the installation ('deliinstall').

Using the 639M harddisk it's fair enough to install DeLi on a partition of 510M or so, leaving about 128M of swap space. The installation routine recognized the already existing swap partition immediately and suggested to use it.

The installation went very well following the commands presented on screen. Afterwards using 'delisetup' for configuration of tiny X server (Xvesa) and icewm as a window manager, setting up network connection, all of this was so easy.

Usability

With only 8M RAM it is absolutely comfortable to use this box on the console only. When it comes to graphic desktop usage, things get different. The icewm desktop starts very well, some small programs and tools are quite okay to use, but unfortunately it's not very comfy to start abiword or sylpheed or the web browser. So I decided to _input_ 16M of additional RAM.

Whenever you change the hardware on this box the system always asks for confirmation whether the changes should be saved (pressing F1 key) or just ignored (by pressing F2). So happened this time. After confirming the total of 24M RAM there was no difference in performance using the console. Only when using X the system worked smoother, so it is possible to use the browser or the word processor, even both at the same time.

Thanks for the good work, Henry!

Karl from Germany

I had this old Toshiba T2100 Laptop and wanted to play with it: - 8 MB RAM (upgraded from 4)
- 340GB half-broken harddisk (lots of bad sectors)
- Floppy
- 16 grayscales 640×480 display
- of cause no USB, no CDROM, no network

I took the harddisk and connected it to my desktop with a 3,5 on 2,5 adapter.

First I just installed Deli, but it did not work, because the harddisk had permanent errors.

Then I booted Knoppix and ran badblocks on the harddisk and parsed the output to mkfs.ext2. (I failed to convince Knoppix to run mkfs.ext2 -cc, it always complained the harddisk was in use (even if i disabled all hardware autodetection))

Then I booted the Deli installation disk and edited the Install-Script to skip mkfs (otherwise my badblocks procedure would have been useless) and followed the installation procedure.

After that, i put the harddisk back to the old laptop and - everything worked fine!

I used the Tiny-X-Server with the chips-driver. It works, but the colors look strange and - of cause - X is quite slow.

Two workarounds for things that did not work:
* I had to create a symbolic link from /dev/mouse to /dev/ttyS0 to make my serial mouse work (the touchpoint is broken) and the link has to be created every system start.
* First I failed to mount msdos-formatted floppies (the easiest way to transfer software to a machine without network and without CDROM) and installed the mtools. After that I found the msdos module, but no place to put modules that should be loaded on system start.

So I created a script /etc/rc.d/local: and added it as a service to be ran on system start with delisetup:

#!/bin/sh\\ 
#\\ 
# /etc/rc.d/local - stuff that should be done on system start\\ 
# at the moment: create link for mouse, load msdos filesystem module\\ 
\\ 
case $1 in\\ 
start)\\ 
        ln -s /dev/ttyS0 /dev/mouse\\ 
        modprobe msdos\\ 
        ;;\\ 
stop)\\ 
        rmmod msdos\\ 
        ;;\\ 
restart)\\ 
        $0 stop\\ 
        sleep 2\\ 
        $0 start\\ 
        ;;\\ 
*)\\ 
        echo "usage: $0 [start|stop|restart]"\\ 
        ;;\\ 
esac\\ 
\\ 
# End of file\\ 

I suppose there is a better way to do both, but as I found no better solution in the wiki, I put the script here.

Nice Distribution.
Kalle

I have 2 Tecra 740CDTs, a single docking station, and a D-Link wireless pcmcia card.

I used the floppies in the docking station and put the CD in the drive of the unit. Slid right in.

When the unit came up, i put yenta_socket in rc.conf, set the BIOS for Cardbus-16, and the pcmcia came up. Then I ran netconfig, and restarted the computer. Network success.

Then I ran deliupdate, deliget firefox. Writing this message to you from firefox now.

This unit has a Chips and Technology 65554 video. I set up the full X server (not tiny) with a “chips” video driver, *NO MOUSE*, and en_US keyboard. X came right up and supported the built in mouse post with no driver at all. Works with 24 bit color.

Every once in a while i have a freeze up, but i think that's a hardware problem, possibly related to the chips 65554.

Thanks for a great distro… BitHead

• Einleitung
• Installation
• Sound
• Pcmcia
• Grafik, Tasten und Trackpoint

Für mich war sofort klar das ich auf diesem altem Gerät ein Linux installieren will. Doch welches ? Nach etlichen Installationen verschiedenster Distributionen wie Damn Small Linux, Debian und Ubuntu habe ich DeLi Linux getestet. Es bootete sofort und war nachdem ein bisschen konfiguriert wurde sofort einsatzbereit und für 16Mb Ram angenehm flott. Die meisten anderen Distributionen waren im Gegensatz dazu nicht fähig mit so wenig Ram zurecht zukommen. Wie man die verschiedensten Komponenten diese Laptops unter DeLi Linux lauffähig bekommt, könnt ihr unter den folgenden Punkten nachlesen.

Am einfachsten ist es die Festplatte auszubauen und über einen Adapter an einen IDE-Anschluss eines anderen PCs anzuschließen, der eine stärkere CPU, mehr Ram und ein CD-Laufwerk besitzt, diese Methode ist vielfach schneller, als eine Installation mit Disketten oder per Modem. Wie man die Festplatte ausbauen kann, wird in dem entsprechendem Handbuch erklärt.

Das Thinkpad beinhaltet einen ess1688 Soundchip der mit dem standartmäßig installiertem Modul

sb.o

funktioniert. Dazu trägt man in die Datei

/etc/modules.conf

folgende Zeile ein:

alias sound-slot-0 sb

Sollte schon ein Eintrag mit einem anderem Modul vorhanden sein, dann diesen entsprechend abändern.

Bei den Pcmcia-slots meines Thinkpads handelt es sich um zwei Anschlüsse für 16-Bit Karten, laut Datenblatt soll es auch 560E Modelle geben die zwei 32-Bit Anschlüsse haben. Damit der Anschluss funktioniert, reicht es in der Datei /etc/rc.d/rc.pcmcia die richtige Treiberbezeichnung anzugeben. Beim Abschnitt PCIC sollte daher folgendes stehen:

   PCIC=i82365

All diese Komponenten werden durch die folgende Datei konfiguriert

/etc/Xorg/xorg.conf

Meine Konfiguration sieht folgendermaßen aus, sie wird vielleicht nicht perfekt sein, jedoch funktioniert es, Verbesserungsvorschläge sind immer willkommen:

Section "ServerLayout"
      Identifier     "Layout0"
      Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
      InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
      InputDevice     "mouse0" "CorePointer"
EndSection
Section "Files"
RgbPath "/usr/share/X11/rgb"
ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc/"
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/"
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/"
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/"
EndSection
Section "Module"
      Load  "freetype"
      # Load "xtt"
      Load  "extmod"
      #Load  "glx"
      #Load  "dri"
      Load  "dbe"
      Load  "record"
      #Load  "xtrap"
      Load  "type1"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
      Identifier   "mouse0"
      Driver       "mouse"
      Option       "Protocol" "PS/2"
      Option       "Device" "/dev/psaux"
      Option       "Buttons" "2"
      Option       "Emulate3Buttons"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
      Identifier  "Keyboard0"
      Driver      "keyboard"
      Option      "XkbModel" "Thinkpad"
      Option      "XkbLayout" "de"
      Option      "nodeadkeys"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
      Identifier   "Monitor0"
      HorizSync    45 - 50
      VertRefresh  70 - 76
EndSection
Section "Device"
      Identifier  "Card0"
      Driver      "vesa"
      Card        "Vesa (generic)"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
      Identifier "Screen0"
      Device     "Card0"
      Monitor    "Monitor0"
      DefaultDepth     16
      SubSection "Display"
              Viewport   0 0
              Depth     16
              Modes    "800x600"
      EndSubSection
EndSection

Das einzige Problem, welches noch besteht ist das Display, es flackert. Eine Veränderung der Frequenzen hat das Problem nicht gelöst, vielleicht liegt es am Display selbst?

Letzte Änderung März 2008

Es ist mit den von der Installations-CD zur Verfügung gestellten und dokumentierten Installationsmethoden nicht möglich, DeLi Linux auf einem IBM Thinkpad mit 486er-Prozessor zu installieren, da

- …kein Bootfähiges CD-Rom-Laufwerk angeschlossen werden kann.
- …die Disketteninstallation keine Möglichkeit zur Eingabe von Kernel-Optionen vorsieht. (Thinkpad-Diskettenlaufwerke benötigen zur einwandfreien Funktion die Kernel-Option “floppy=thinkpad”, sonst bricht der Bootvorgang beim Laden von Diskette ab.)

Daher bedarf der Installations-Vorgang auf einem Thinkpad ein paar Tricks und zusätzlicher Hardware.

Benötigt werden:
*Ein IBM Thinkpad (z.B. “755C”)
*Docking-Station “Dock II”
*Ein SCSI-CD-Rom-Laufwerk
*Die DeLi-Linux-Installations-CD
*Eine Diskette der Distribution tomsrtbt (getestete Version: 2.0.103)
*Eine Diskette zum Booten von DeLi Linux

(Bemerkung: Es kann durchaus möglich sein, dass die Docking-Station überflüssig ist, wenn man in Besitz einer von tomsrtbt unterstützten PCMCIA-Netzwerkkarte ist, da man sich so die delibase.tgz auch aus dem Netzwerk oder Internet herunterladen kann.)

Zunächst wird tomsrtbt ins Diskettenlaufwerk gesteckt und der lilo-Bootprompt abgewartet. Es folgt die Eingabe:

bz2bzImage floppy=thinkpad

Daraufhin sollte tomsrtbt vollständig booten. Es folgt das Login mit Passworteingabe, in diesem Fall also root und xxxx. Nun haben wir die Möglichkeit, unsere Festplatte - falls nötig - zu partitionieren und zu formatieren, bevor wir die Festplatte ins Dateisystem einhängen. (Das Partitionieren geschieht mit dem - weitestgehend selbsterklärenden - “fdisk”.)

(nur falls nötig: mke2fs /dev/hda1)

mkdir /mnt/target
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/target

Jetzt wird die CD-Rom eingebunden…

mount /dev/scd0 /cdrom

…und “delibase.tgz” auf die Festplatte kopiert.

cp /cdrom/delibase.tgz /mnt/target/

Das Entpacken kann leider nicht in einem Schritt erfolgen, da die tar-Version von tomsrtbt dies nicht zulässt.

cd /mnt/target
gunzip delibase.tgz
tar xvf delibase
rm delibase

Es bedarf noch einer kleinen Feinheit, damit das System danach ordentlich booten kann: in der /etc/fstab muss noch /dev/hda1 für / angegeben werden. (Zur Sicherheit: Gemeint ist natürlich die fstab des zu installlierenden Systems - die zu editierende Datei heißt also nicht wirklich /etc/fstab, sondern /mnt/target/etc/fstab!) Die Zeile sieht also ungefähr so aus:

/dev/hda1   /   ext2   defaults   0 0

tomsrtbt wird nun nicht mehr gebraucht und kann heruntergefahren werden. Stattdessen tritt die zweite Boot-Diskette in Aktion. Sie muss auf das Deli-Linux-System abgestimmt sein. Am einfachsten geht das mit “grub”. Von Debian aus wären folgende Schritte nötig:

mkfs.ext2 /dev/fd0
mount /dev/fd0
grub-install root-directory=/media/floppy0 /dev/fd0

Dann muss eine passende “menu.lst” erstellt werden. Diese könnte z.B. so aussehen:

default		0
timeout		5
title			DeLi Install
root			(hd0,0)
kernel		/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.33.3 root=/dev/hda1 rw floppy=thinkpad

Das war's auch schon grob. Nach dem Booten sollte uns das neue System mit einer Login-Aufforderung begrüßen. Jetzt muss man nur noch (ohne Passwort) als root eingeloggen und “delisetup” starten - den Rest besorgt das Installationssystem.

Both of these came to me by way of scrounging or inheriting (IE: totally free). I-opener's originally came with 166mhzcpu, 16mb built-in flash disk for QNX OS, and 32mb of RAM. The one I got was already hacked to use 200mhz cpu, 128mb RAM, and had a 40gb laptop HDD intalled. I had Ubuntu (Intrepid 8.10 then Jaunty 9.04) installed on it, but only command-line, since GUI was too sluggish. It was ok, but would have a kernel panic every other day if left on constantly. (Was leaving it on as a torrent client/slave using rtorrent as command-line client). Got fed up with that, so explored Damn Small Linux, but couldn't get wireless Airlink USB adapter to work (AWL-3026, which works good with Linux kernel 2.6.x since drivers are in those kernels, but the AWL-3028 is still too new to work with Linux well from what I've read.) Tried Puppy Linux Deep-Thought 4.2, which worked well and setup easily, but was still sluggish. Decided to try Deli Linux, and while it's taken a bit more manual setup (hand-tweaking config files and such) it's definitely a lot snappier. Tiny X with Xvesa works good. Not sure about sound, since I'm not really concerned about sound on this setup. The i-opener does not come with CD-Rom or floppy drives, but can hook external ones via serial/usb. However, BIOS cannot boot from them. So, like others, I transplanted the hard drive into another computer that could boot from CD and installed there. Transplanting back worked fine. I'm still having trouble getting wireless going, since WPA_Supplicant and Wifi_tools are not installed by default (network I'm on forces me to use WPA encryption). I've set that up manually in Ubuntu, though, so it should just be a matter of getting the packages installed. Still a work in progress. But other than that, everything else is working. Note, you might have to use ide=nodma kernel boot cheat code to prevent it from trying to detect DMA options on the HDD. Otherwise you get stuck at boot for 1-2 minutes while it tries various DMA attempts.

Omnibook is 166mhz, 32mb ram, using DWL-G650 pcmcia card, too (a person above had success with it, so I was just going to copy what they've done.) Omnibook 800CT was more of a sub-notebook back in its day, using an external floppy and cd-rom drive … which I didn't get with it. So, again, just transplanting the 2gb (lol!) HDD from it into another machine that can boot from cd, installing deli, and then moving it back to the omnibook. So far, so good. As long as the swap is going, everything seems to be ok, but icewm is a bit sluggish. Going to try to trim down what's running to save memory. Like the i-opener, I tried Ubuntu command-line-only, DSL & Puppy Linux on it. None wanted to boot. Ubuntu needs more than 32mb just to boot. Puppy was stalling out (at first because it was trying to use DMA on the HDD, which the omnibook doesn't support, so ide=nodma again on boot fixed that), but once puppy got going it was very sluggish. Damn Small Linux was snappy, but the GUI was borked, doing reverse colorization and not drawing the GUI to the screen size necessary. Someone (Neil's Tech Docs?) talked about how he got DSL going on an 800CT, but it required downloading a MyDSL add-on. I couldn't get wireless to work in DSL (because, as someone stated above, newer versions of DSL don't seem to like GWL-G650 pcmcia cards, even though they say it's on the “just works” list … hmmm.) I gave up on DSL and just went with Deli on the ominbook after I had success with the i-opener using Deli. Takes a little more manual tweaking & setup, but the delisetup really helps with most of it. I just wish wifitools and wpa-supplicant came as part of the Default deli distro, since a lot of folks use wifi, and wpa is usually the norm now, not wep.

Still, nice job! Thanks!

The /etc/X11/xorg.conf is for the simultaneous usage of the internal and an external PS/2 mouse :

      Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "Layout0"
        Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
        InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
        InputDevice    "Mouse1" "SendCoreEvents"
        InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
      EndSection

     Section "Module"
        # Load  "dri"
        Load  "freetype"
        # Load "xtt"
        Load  "extmod"
        # Load  "glx"
        #Load  "dbe"
        Load  "record"
        # Load  "xtrap"
        Load  "type1"
      EndSection

      Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Keyboard0"
        Driver      "kbd"
        Option      "XkbModel" "toshiba_s3000"
        Option      "XkbLayout" "de"
      EndSection

      Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Mouse0"
        Driver      "mouse"
        Option      "Protocol" "PS/2"
        Option      "Device" "/dev/psaux"
        Option      "Emulate3Buttons"
      EndSection

      Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Mouse1"
        Driver      "mouse"
        Option      "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
        Option      "Emulate3Buttons"
        Option      "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
      EndSection

      Section "Monitor"
      ### Comment all HorizSync and VertRefresh values to use DDC:
      ### Comment all HorizSync and VertRefresh values to use DDC:
      ### Comment all HorizSync and VertRefresh values to use DDC:
      ### Comment all HorizSync and VertRefresh values to use DDC:
      ### Comment all HorizSync and VertRefresh values to use DDC:
      ### Comment all HorizSync and VertRefresh values to use DDC:
      ### Comment all HorizSync and VertRefresh values to use DDC:
      ### Comment all HorizSync and VertRefresh values to use DDC:
        Identifier   "Monitor0"
      ### Comment all HorizSync and VertRefresh values to use DDC:
        HorizSync    31.5 - 48.5
        VertRefresh  50.0 - 70.0
      EndSection

      Section "Device"
        Identifier  "Card0"
        Driver      "chips"
        Card        "Chips & Technologies CT65555"
      EndSection

      Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device     "Card0"
        Monitor    "Monitor0"
        DefaultDepth     24
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     24
                Modes    "800x600"
        EndSubSection
      EndSection

just add the following line to /etc/rc.modules to start the sound driver at boottime :

     /sbin/modprobe sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=0