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!
