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[metal.lunchbox]

I decided to try to boot slitaz on the xo after seeing the problems with puppy linux. I didn't try it with the boot folder it came with and instead used the one that came with F11 os10 which is a 2.6.31 kernel and boots on the xo. I've gotten it to boot to console but X isn't working. I haven't played around with it much but so far so good. Slitaz is another minimal linux system designed to run on slow machines but unlike puppy it doesn't use squashfs. I know very little about linux boot procedure so I've gotten this far mostly with blind luck. I'll keep you posted.

james

[metal.lunchbox]

after getting slitaz working halfway I decided to abandon the effort realizing that something based on Debian or another mainstream distro would be the only really useful option, because of support, maintanance, and the availabiity of software.

[mavrothal]

after getting slitaz working halfway I decided to abandon the effort realizing that something based on Debian or another mainstream distro would be the only really useful option, because of support, maintanance, and the availabiity of software.

Oh, com'n don't chicken out  

Slitaz has more than 2000 packages to install! All major apps are there, from GIMP to OpenOffice.
And you certainly do not expect for a minimalistic distro to run everything. Running everything requires also the infrastructure thus all the speed and efficiency is gone.
Besides the "heavy" distros Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE already run on the XO.

Go for it! Mess with the Xserver

[metal.lunchbox]

Here's where I am so far

Using Qemu I booted the slitaz-cooking.iso and did a hard-drive install to a raw disk image. using dd I cloned that image onto a usb thumb-drive. The install did not have a ramdisk ( no olpcrd.img or initrd.img ) and I was not able to get the olpc to boot from this kernel. It may be possible to boot the given boot folder on the olpc but I haven't the first clue how I would make that happen. Instead I simply moved the old boot folder and copied the os8 ( F11 with 2.6.30 kernel) boot folder and modules and wrote an appropriate olpc.fth to load it. It failed to boot but suggested I disable selinux from the bootloader. I did and was able to boot but received several errors.

Module scsi_wait not found. /premount/10olpc-boot-premount.sh not found. and proc failed to populate. I was also not able to start X, but I want a pretty clean boot first.

I don't have a clear idea how to proceed from here to fixing problems at boot, but I'm pretty confident I can get x working.

james

[metal.lunchbox]

Like DSL slitaz uses TinyX instead of xorg xserver and comes with a vesa driver. I suspect that Xvesa is not compatible with the olpc's video setup, but I certainly do not know how to make it work. Can someone confirm this? is there another driver that WILL work on the xo. Unitil them I'm letting this one go and going back to just stripping down a mainstream distro.

[mavrothal]

Like DSL slitaz uses TinyX instead of xorg xserver and comes with a vesa driver. I suspect that Xvesa is not compatible with the olpc's video setup, but I certainly do not know how to make it work. Can someone confirm this? is there another driver that WILL work on the xo. Unitil them I'm letting this one go and going back to just stripping down a mainstream distro.

Indeed the XO does not support Xvesa (for reasons that are not clear to me). You need to include/compile the fx86-vedeo-geode in the xserver if not present.

Module scsi_wait not found. /premount/10olpc-boot-premount.sh not found. and proc failed to populate.

This is a module configuration problem but besides the threatening warning is not a problem for the operation since the devices are populated later.