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Installing DSL on an old Thinkpad 380ed· 3. October 2005, 15:38

DSL (Damn Small Linux) 1.5 on an old IBM Thinkpad 380ed

I just dusted up an old Thinkpad that my wife used in college. It ran (and still does) Windows 95.

Hardware Specs:
3GB HDD
98 MB RAM
2 PCMCIA Cards Slots
Xircom Modem/Ethernet
Pentium 133 Mhz
CDROM
Floppy

I tried a variety of distributions of which I had live CD’s available, (ubuntu, mandrake, knoppix, puppy linux and DSL) but finally decided on DSL because it detected all the hardware and had the option of using frame buffer drivers instead of VESA

Live-CD Testing:

  1. Downloaded DSL’s latest iso and burned it to a CD (on a different computer obviously)
  2. Tried booting form burned CD, found out that this Thinkpad’s BIOS had issues booting from some CD’s. Thankfully this was easily fixed by:
    • Downloading the latest IBM Bios from
    • Running the downloaded file, which in turn creats a boot floopy, and booting from said floppy.
  3. Booted from burned CD. After a couple of tries with different boot parameters, the correct parameters are:
    • fb800×600 vga=788
  4. Voilà! We have Linux and X running!
  5. I don’t have an Ethernet network available, but the modem is detected right away and with the control panel you can config ppp without any problems, The only thing I had to change from the defaults was the modem’s port (it was on stty3)

Installation to HD:

DSL has 2 different Hard Disk Installation Options:

At first it made more sense for me to have a Debian box and manage everything through apt, since I´ve used Debian before. The install was as easy as booting the cd with the option “install”. After that was done I used my ubuntu disks to install apps, and got the apps I wanted (OpenOffice.org 1.1) running

After reading the forums for DSL I realized that the developers push the frugal method as the correct installation to go with the philosophy of DSL, so I decided to give it a go. The install is a breeze (again you go through the install boot option and follow the menus). This type of install sounds like a a great paradigm change, you have an “unbreakable” base system on top of which you do all the configuration and modifications you want. This is still far from bullet-proof, as you could still easily botch your config and have to start over from the base system, but with some care this is very secure and it certainly is an interesting change of the way things are done.
Along with the core system I have .uci extensions of Opera and Open Office 2.0 Beta, along with a couple of other extensions I don’t use that much. For extensions of type dsl I can only load a couple before the ramdisk is saturated. This runs very well for me as long as I don’t try to open too many windows at a time. There was a hack submitted that allows ramdisk to use swapspace and I’m anxiously waiting for the DSL team to apply it to DSL1.6 (Although I’m still trying to come to terms with the idea of using my HD to mascarade as RAM that mascarades as a virtual HD, but that should work out in the end)

When I decided to go with frugal I did the following Partitions:

  1. I used the parted.dsl extension with the Live CD to resize the Partitions I had, I left Win 95 with 1.5GB and will probably delete that soon, I haven’t had the need for that space yet :)
  2. Then i used cfdisk to create the following structure:
    • 60 MB hda2—to have the base system, that according to DSL’s FAQ will never be over 50MB
    • 1140 MB hda5—to have /home, /opt, and all the extensions either in the root directory of this partition (loaded at startup) or in the /optional directory (available for installing through the menu)
    • 300 MB hda6 (swap space)

Issues: