Installation on old laptop with limited RAM (HP Pavilion ze4600)
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Hello people,
I have been trying to install Trisquel on an old HP Pavilion ze4600, as yet without success. I want to subject a possibly infected usb pendrive to a scan by ClamAV or some other anti-virus/malware program, and I prefer to do that on this old less-critical computer rather than on my main system. Secondly, it would be neat to make this old laptop useful again. (Its original WinXP has gotten extremely dated/slow, to the point that I can't get any anti-virus software to run on it; and I don't really want to use it anyway). Thirdly, I'm keen to go '100% free'.
The laptop's got an 1.87-GHz AMD Athlon CPU, 256 MB RAM (no expansion on hand), and an ATI Mobility Radeon graphics card.
I first went with a Trisquel Lite 7.0 CD I had. The Live session runs very well: smooth, and everything is pretty much recognized including the TP-Link wireless dongle. However the graphical installation is so agonizingly slow that I threw in the towel (10-30 or so minutes per step, then seemingly indefinitely at step 3 or 4, with the CD whirring and the whole thing starting to overheat).
Then I downloaded Trisquel Lite 8.0, and UNetbootin'ed it onto a USB stick (not the problematic one of course). This is not recognized by the laptop's BIOS in itself, but I can run it using Plop Linux's PlopKexec boot manager (itself sitting in the CD drive). However, it does not boot properly: the boot sequence halts with a number of messages I don't really understand, the last ones being:
[8.782930] KernelOffset: disabled
[8.782978] ---[end Kernel panic - not syncing: UFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (3,0)
[18.096042] random: nonblocking pool is initialized
Then I tried the Netinstall (8.0), figuring I probably need a non-graphical installer anyway to minimize RAM usage. Working over a LAN cable, things went swimmingly until halfway the "loading additional components" stage, where at 53-54% I get a
Failed to load installer component
loading apt-mirror-setup failed for unknown reasons. Aborting.
Could it be that the measly RAM has filled up at that point?
Note: I did all the checksum checks I could on the images used... I don't think the problem lies there.
Would you people have suggestions on what more I can try? (This from a long-time but not particularly proficient GNU/Linux user - I don't fear the command line but no wizard either.) Just maybe the text-based installer of the full edition would do the trick, but I don't have a big enough unsuspect pendrive for its 2.5 Gigs :/
NB: I managed to install the Puppy variant Librepup, which claims to be libre and works with the Trisquel repos (see http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=101106). That seemed very good at first, but (1) after installing ClamAV I couldn't get it to work (there are no freshclam.conf or clamd.conf files for it to work with, and they are not generated by any command I try... perhaps this is expected; then I have to know how to make these manually, but I could not figure it out from a first look at the docs); and moreover (2) the X config seems to get mucked up unintentionally first by a Ctrl-Alt-Backspace on a hanging Qupzilla, then by installing synaptics drivers -- so X won't start any more, and xorgwizard can't get me a working config. Before I re-try to troubleshoot Librepup, I would like to hear if a Trisquel install may be possible after all, or is unlikely.
Thanks for your time!
> However the graphical installation is so agonizingly slow
> that I threw in the towel (10-30 or so minutes per step, then seemingly
> indefinitely at step 3 or 4, with the CD whirring and the whole thing
> starting to overheat).
I often ran into that with the Trisquel 7 graphical installer. The solution was to use the text installer instead. I'm referring to the text mode option for the regular Trisquel 7 image, not the netinstall image. The graphical installer has worked fine for me with Trisquel 8, though.
> Could it be that the measly RAM has filled up at that point?
How much RAM do you have?
> Just maybe the text-based installer of
> the full edition would do the trick, but I don't have a big enough unsuspect
> pendrive for its 2.5 Gigs :/
Trisquel Mini doesn't have a text installer?
The Trisquel 7 ISO is a little smaller than the Trisquel 8 ISO. It's 1.5 GB. Do you have a USB drive large enough for that? I always found the Trisquel 7 text installer to be very reliable.
Hi folks,
Thanks for your answers. Trisquel 7 is now running on the old beast :)
**mason**, you gave the key, thanks! The v7 ISO did fit on my 2GB pendrive, and installation did indeed work out via the text installer, after some wrangling. It's running fairly smoothly (on 256MB RAM). The wireless dongle was not recognized, but I installed the necessary Atheros drivers over the LAN cable. Synaptic and the "Add/Remove applications" program keep hanging, but apt-get works fine. And ClamAV seems to get installed preconfigured (unlike in Librepup). I can't get the database updated yet, but that's for a new topic.
> Trisquel Mini doesn't have a text installer?
It doesn't seem to. A bit odd and unfortunate.
some more thoughts, perhaps also addressed at the **Trisquel maintainers**:
1) Surprisingly with the 1.5GB ISO I could in fact install the Mini setup as a software choice option. Nice!, but it would be nicer still if this were mentioned somewhere. I didn't try the 'big' ISO at first because I figured it would necessarily install the 'big' window manager and other software, and that the laptop was unlikely to run that.
2) Another surprise: using the text installer from the big ISO still requires an Internet connection to download some files. (Or does it?) Not a problem in my case, but you'd hope everything would be on the ISO, no? [BTW, this phase looked similar/identical to that of the Netinstall version which did not work for me, as described in the first post. If it's the same, I'm not sure why it did work now.]
3) I had to redo the install. The first time Grub couldn't be installed to the automatically chosen /dev/sda; then in order to figure out why, I went back to the 'disk overview' (paraphrasing) step and some other steps and after nosing around a bit (while not making any changes) the bootloader install wouldn't work at all any more and the install couldn't be finished. Arguably I should have realized the pendrive was on /dev/sda and the hard disk on /dev/sdb, and corrected the default. Still, an easy mistake to make?, and a hassle to do it all over.
But perhaps these do not apply to v8.
4) Maybe there could be a direct link to the v7 images on the Downloads page?
To **CalmStorm**: yes, it looks like Librepup is no longer maintained. I figured it would be in working order though since it uses Trisquel's repos (?). It is very nice and snappy, but it does not seem to be a stable solution in my case because of the aforementioned issues.
pax vobiscum
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