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<Is trying out simplyMEPIS 3.3 on an old 700mhz, 64 mb ram laptop, while downloading libranet 2.8.1>

Mandrake 10.0 didn't really work for me. It refused to recognise a lot of my hardware.

Hmmm.... I chose the 'older harware' option, but the MEPIS CD is taking forever to boot.

<listens to the sound of the CD drive and HD doing their frenzied thing>

Oh dear. My laptop's frozen with a blank screen.

<reboots>

Now it's sitting at a prompt saying 'mepis1 login:' and won't budge.

Solved it. Apparently I had to type 'demo' for both the 'login:' and 'password:' promts. How wonderfully intuitive

Found the solution here: http://www.mepis.org/node/5160

Hmmmph! Now I'm at a command promt, helpfully named 'Demo@tty1[~]$'. After randomly typing things like 'kde', 'gnome' and 'boot ya monkey!', I found that typing 'login' gives me the following:

Since I have no idea what utmp or "sh" are, I'm a bit stuck.

aargh, crap. my machine is a 900MHz celeron and runs fine with the 2.6.10 kernel - try that one. I had a similar problem recently (kdm not launching kde) after my toddler had been messing with it again - resetting the x11 options from the live CD fixed it. I assume from this that it is a display issue - try the newer kernel perhaps?

If it was a display issue, would I still have a pyramid and moon/sun background wallpaper at the command prompt?

I'll try fiddling with to see if I can get it working.

<Dons his reboot-dance dress and disk-noise prayer shawl>

if it was a display issue, kdm would not boot into the login menu with pyramid etc, but go to the 'mepis1' command prompt instead. it is also possible that the system has insufficient memory but is worth tinkering anyway I reckon.

Dunc

I seem to have a bit of a problem. I can't restart or shutdown. Pressing the shutdown button (an holding it for the usual few seconds for a force shutdown) isn't doing anything, and being a laptop, there's no plug to pull. Guess I'll have to take the battery out.

Huh. I took the battery out and it kept on running . There must be a backup in it, but I'll have to unscrew some stuff to get at it. Anyone know of a software solution?

I assume you've tried typing reboot at the command prompt. strange.... out of my (meagre) experience I'm afraid.

http://www.mepis.org/node/6634


Peter, you might want to check this out. The Mepis folks are working on a Lite version of Mepis for older hardware.

Ah, thanks. That did the trick. I'd tried 'shutdown' and 'restart', but not 'reboot'.

*Note to laptop manufacturers: Please make them with switches that actually interrupt the power supply. It may not be terribly good for them, but sometimes it's the only way.

I've been reading some worrying stuff about mepis. Think I might give it a miss. I've got a CD with featherlinux on it which I'm going to try with my laptop.

http://linux-blog.org/index.php?/archives/86-MEPIS-Linux-Loses-Another-Support-Site.html

Don't like the sound of that... *grumble* shame really as the distro itself is brilliant. might have to consider trying a couple of others as a dual boot until I can find one as good.