Kubuntu 7.10 on old Toshiba Satellite s1800-204

[Spik3]

Hello to all,

I have a really old laptop (Toshiba Satellite s1800, PIII, 256MB, 10Gb HDD) and I thought to give it a try and install Kubuntu 7.10.
My problem is that after the initial boot menu (and after the cd working for 3-4minutes) the screen becomes black, and that's it; the laptop stops doing anything (Alt+Ctr+Del works ). I tried several other options from the boot menu (safe graphics mode, OEM install, etc) but the result is always the same. The laptop's graphic chip is Trident Cyberblade Ai1 (as I said before, the laptop is OLD), has this something to do?

I checked some other topics with Satellite (also the famous Toshiba Satellite Laptop Success Story), but my laptop is much older and I couldn't find something relevant.

Any information would be very helpful,
Thanks in advance.

[dibl]

Re: Kubuntu 7.10 on old Toshiba Satellite s1800-204

Yes, that is a bit of a museum piece, isn't it?

I take it you are attempting to run the Live CD? I believe it is F6, or maybe F4, that provides some boot options. You're going to need to play around with those -- maybe "VGA" or "VESA" or "Safe Graphics" mode will work. I'm pretty confident it's some video issue, so work on it from that angle and you should be able to get some kind of GUI working.

[Spik3]

Re: Kubuntu 7.10 on old Toshiba Satellite s1800-204

Well, I'm running the kubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso file burned in CD. Apart from the boot menu options, F6 displays a terminal-like command line boot options but to be honest I'm new in linux and I don't know what arguments I can try. 'Vesa' and 'Vga' are not existing options (not in the boot menu, that is).

PS. The exact symptom is the screen going black with the cursor blinking (upper left), but no keyboard input. Caps lock is working, meaning the laptop hasn't crashed.

[kortsen]

Re: Kubuntu 7.10 on old Toshiba Satellite s1800-204

Before I jumped into the Kubuntu world I did some Googling of recommended system requirements. The concensus for 7.10 Gutsy is that 384MB is recommended for the Live CD. If you install from the Alternate Install CD (as I did) 256MB is sufficient (as I merrily found out.)

Since I had been mucking with other distros I had a 1GB swap partition on my hard drive before I even started looking at Kubuntu. My first 'kick at the cat1' was a Live CD of 7.04 Feisty. It recognized and used the swap space, and ran well enough to convince me to install it. It ran just fine and when 7.10 showed up in Adept I did a version upgrade that way. After mucking around for a while I decided a clean re-install was in order so I downloaded the 7.10 Alternate Install CD and had zero problems.

In summary, based on my personal experience, you might want to try finding a 7.04 Live CD as a proof-of-concept experiment. And you may want to set up a 512MB-1GB swap partition, which would be a must for any version of Linux you want to install permanently.


1 No cats were harmed in the installation of Kubuntu on my computer.

[dibl]

Re: Kubuntu 7.10 on old Toshiba Satellite s1800-204

PS. The exact symptom is the screen going black with the cursor blinking (upper left), but no keyboard input. Caps lock is working, meaning the laptop hasn't crashed.

Aha -- OK, there is hope. Let's cavalierly disregard the facts that kortsen has inconveniently pointed out, and try something.

So, on the black screen with blinky cursor, do Alt-F1, and see if you get a terminal with login prompt. If so, you should log in. It's been too long since I played with a live CD -- I don't remember the default user name and password -- is it "demo" and "demo"?

Assuming you get past that little question, and get logged in at the terminal, then what you want to do is the following:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

This will start the xserver configuration script. On the first question, answer "NO", and on the second question where it asks for display type, you should "X" "vesa". After that, you can probably figure the correct responses.

When the script is finished, it dumps you back to the command line. At that point, you can enter

startx

and maybe get lucky and get a GUI desktop.

[kortsen]

Re: Kubuntu 7.10 on old Toshiba Satellite s1800-204

After Dibl's last dig I had to fire up my Live CD and see what happens.

So, on the black screen with blinky cursor, do Alt-F1, and see if you get a terminal with login prompt.

If xserver is running but the screen is pooched, try [Ctl][Alt][F1]

If so, you should log in. It's been too long since I played with a live CD -- I don't remember the default user name and password -- is it "demo" and "demo"?

You will be automatically logged in as ubuntu@ubuntu and no password is required.

Assuming you get past that little question, and get logged in at the terminal, then what you want to do is the following:

The first thing to do is kill the xserver if it's running. The command is

sudo killall kdm

If this step wasn't required you will get the error

KDM no process killed

No harm, no foul.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

This will start the xserver configuration script. On the first question, answer "NO", and on the second question where it asks for display type, you should "X" "vesa". After that, you can probably figure the correct responses.

When the script is finished, it dumps you back to the command line. At that point, you can enter

startx

and maybe get lucky and get a GUI desktop.

[Spik3]

Re: Kubuntu 7.10 on old Toshiba Satellite s1800-204

First of all thank you both for your replies .

Sadly the Alt+F1/Ctr+Alt+F1 didn't work. The command line invoked when the 'Safe Graphics mode' is selected (from the boot menu), is:

file=/cdrom/preseed/kubuntu.seed boot=casper xforcevesa initrd=/casper/initrd.gz quiet splash --

The vesa option is there from the start.. I don't know if some other arguments exist, so I could experiment with them..

[dibl]

Re: Kubuntu 7.10 on old Toshiba Satellite s1800-204

Try adding "vga=771" before the "splash" option, so that the boot line looks like this:

file=/cdrom/preseed/kubuntu.seed boot=casper xforcevesa initrd=/casper/initrd.gz quiet vga=771 splash --

That will force a 800x600 display at 256 colors.

to edit that line from the boot menu, press "e". When you are done with the edits, cursor to the end of it and press Enter, then to boot it highlight it and press "b".

Luck o' the Irish to you!

[Spik3]

Re: Kubuntu 7.10 on old Toshiba Satellite s1800-204

vga=771 didn't work either but something else did. The reqs for 7.10 are >320MB RAM and the laptop has 256 (should be less free because of the onboard graphics chip, I assume). So I (successfully ) installed kubuntu 6.06 (from the alternative image) that works for systems below 192MB.

It seems it was a RAM problem afterall. Thx for the feedback dibl.

[dibl]

Re: Kubuntu 7.10 on old Toshiba Satellite s1800-204

Wow, I didn't know it really wouldn't run on 256MB. Well, all's well that ends well!