Talk:Toshiba Satellite Pro 460CDT

From Gentoo Wiki
Jump to:navigation Jump to:search

LiveCDs and Low Memory

Talk status
This discussion is still ongoing.

This is a really good article so far. Just to give you some ideas to make it even better the lowest I've managed to get a recent kernel to boot on is 26mb with a lot of hacking so you might be better off telling people to use 32mb as the minimum.

If you want to tell people on how to use LiveCDs for recovery then recommend the Gentoo ISO for >=140MB and the Alpine ISO for <140MB, if the laptop doesn't support usb booting then Plop from a floppy https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html or pxe is the only option (Your current method is the one I'd recommend though.)

When you get to the installing part we have an article that shows people how to get it setup at Binary_package_guide#Chrooting

Hope this gives you some ideas.

Immolo (talk) 04:19, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

Thank you. Yes, it's possible that a recent stock kernel needs 26mb or RAM but I'm suggesting explicitly to make a custom kernel and do a little bit of debloating. I have not tested a stock kernel on the machine because i thought it would take up way too much as it is, but maybe I'm wrong. With the custom kernel that i have created the machine boots with 9MB of RAM. I'm hoping to get it down to <8MB but i dont think i can slim it down even more than it is without losing functionality.
I tested the Gentoo LiveCD on the machine but it did not boot due to lack of RAM (I have 64-meg model), the only livecd distro really that i managed to get running was TinyCore Linux (even AOSC did not work), i recommend people to buy a external USB to IDE adapter because emerging anything on the toshiba is absolutely impossible. It just takes way too long to be a valid suggestion. So I think I will skip the whole LiveCD part.
I think i did not mention it in the guide but the laptop has a CD drive, as well as an external floppy drive, I will talk about those in later parts of the guide.
By the way if you know or know someone who knows how to get Chips and Technologies GPU support in the kernel (not in X) i would highly appreciate that. Information on this GPU chip is nonexistent nowadays.
--User:Jacob 09:28, 26 November 2023 (CET)
RE Kernel size:
26mb was with everything stripped down, the actually kernel size was around 5mb IIRC but when loading at the bootloader it needed 26mb to boot. I think I only tested in GRUB so trying syslinux or LILO might be a valid attempt to get it down.
RE LiveCD
I use The Alpine ISO I said before for my old Pentium 3 installs so if you decided to add it I recommend that one. As for compiling you are right I did Rust once and it took 38 days but sometimes it's just quicker to pop in a cd to fix a config issue than pull out the drive was the only reason I brought it up.
I'm on both IRC and Discord if you wish to discuss the issue with getting things like the GPU working so feel free to reach out.
Immolo (talk) 08:43, 26 November 2023 (UTC)