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Any good teenie weenie Linux distros w/ fbdev?

Cerb

Cerb

Elite Member
So, I've got an old Compaq Laptop, and the only distro that has worked so far has been DSL w/ fbdev. While not bad, I'd like to try a bit more, if possible. Puppy, Feather, Easys, and an old version of DeLi (why must the new one only be a VMWare image?) all fail to some degree (Puppy almost works, but the display is not readable enough to navigate).

I'd like to try more (though I may go for DSL + Debian, for now), but there doesn't seem to be much selection that I can find. Any distros not mentioned that might work on this hardware? I might be up for trying a BSD, even, but fbdev appears to be a must, thus far. Live CD is preferable, but not necessarily a requirement.

P166MMX
32MB RAM (no upgrade capability AFAIK)
3GB HDD
Neomagic Magicgraph 128XD video
 
Don't most distros offer XFree86 3 for support of old cards too? The last neomagic crippled laptop I had worked fine with XFree 3.
 
I'll look into that. I'm honestly not sure, as I've not had this trouble before (that is, it kind-of-working w/ Xvesa).

As an update, I found a 128MB SODIMM around, and the laptop sees it as its full size. I'm currently letting it run memtest. If it passes, though, I'll be home free for using distros not quite so small (but, again, may stick w/ DSL, since it has been the only one to 'just work' so far).

Nice sig, BTW. I need to try out OpenBSD one of these days.

Edit: well, crap. It starts erroring just over 63MB (64MB memory hole?), and quits just under 64MB. There isn't a way to tell the kernel it can't access more than X MB RAM, is there (at least, that's not too hard to do 🙂)?
 
OpenBSD includes XFree86 3.3.6 I think for some unsupported by Xorg hardware.

I'm not sure about the memory thing, there might be something out there...
 
I have a laptop with the same graphics card. If you find one, let me know. Or actually don't bother, since my laptop only has 16 megs of ram.. heh.. I ran DSL fine just like you though.
 
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