Slax author's Blog (RSS)

Yup, the 32bit CD now boots whether PAE is enabled or not in virtualbox.

Only the kernel takes some time to boot.
Starts with
Loading slax/boot/vmlinuz
Loading slax/boot/initrfs.img
Then it takes some time before the rest of the kernel messages are displayed.

Maybe just a delay in my system since I am using a virtual environment.

Thanks for the info. How long is the time interval? On my computer it takes about 1 second, which is imho acceptable. I'm not sure what it actually does during that time, perhaps some checks.

It takes 25 seconds. I checked multiple times. Always the same time.

What compression are you using , how do I open the initrfs.img.
just curious.

@ralcocer:
I think it is gzipped. So rename initrfs.img to initrfs.gz, gunzip it and then it is a cpio archive.

I found this very interesting "slitaz@org "/en/doc/scratchbook/

@Jason:
very strange. Probably a problem of virtualBox, vmware doesn't do that.

I was able to run some of my xz modules except for the dbus error I keep getting,If you could get the Xorg module running I mught be able to run my LXDE Desktop.

BTW I am using Qemu

When could we start testing ARM (raspberryPI)?

I've decided not to release ARM version at the moment. It seems to me each ARM device is different and needs different tweaks; I thought there could be universal ARM build which would work everywhere, but it doesn't appear to be the case. And supporting only RasPI doesn't look like any useful idea.

That makes perfect sense to me. Thanks Tomas for all your contributions to the open world!

I'm using a Dell machine, Core2Duo, 4GB of RAM.
The 32-bit Slax behaved extremely well, the boot was very fast. After logging tested the processing fee that were low as was expected, the audio was recognized perfectly, I was able to connect to the internet.
Satisfied with the test so far.

Why, after booting the flash drive, the Slax boot menu always is shown again after the time finishes or if I press enter ?

I downloaded slax-prealpha-3b-i486.tar, extracted the slax folder to the root directory and ran the bootinst.bat script.

Always the time finishes, the Slax boot menu reappears. Even if I press enter, the menu is shown again.

This behavior is expected for slax-boot-options-test.tar
It happens if no kernel image is found (/slax/boot/vmlinuz is missing). Please check your installation directory /slax/boot whether it contains vmlinuz and initrfs.img files.

I'm sorry for bothering. I just reextracted the slax-prealpha-3b-i486.tar file and everything worked.

Unhappily, like most distros, Slax didn't recognize my harddisk. I always have to download the kernel source, use make x86_64_defconfig (even with 32 bit system) and customize the rest to see my harddisk working.

Any kernel configured with make i386_defconfig, usually, does not recognize my harddisk.

In Porteus 1.0, with my custom kernel, KInfoCenter from KDE 4.5.5 shows these informations:

HD:
SAMSUNG HD160JJ
Vendor: ATA
UDI: /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/storage_serial_SAMSUNG_HD160JJ_P_120111FLA61327

Any ditro witch does not recognize my harddisk shows the error messages:
qc timeout
failed to IDENTIFY

Using acpi=off had no effect, but even if it had solved, I gess the driver nouveau, for nVidia graphic cards, stops working without ACPI and I would have to use VESA.

The command ping slax.org said "bad value for address" (or something like that).

The command rexima returned "no such file or directory".

@Liquid Snake:
thank you very much for testing. It seems your computer is entirely unsupported :) What is your hardware configuration? Thank you

I have a computer from 2007, with Athlon 64, 1.5 GB of DDR memory, a PATA DVD recorder and a SATA harddisk, SAMSUNG HD160JJ, with 160 GB.

The only way I get a kernel that works is using make x86_64_defconfig, activating nouveau, all the filesystems, everything inside ethernet and everything inside SATA.

Result from the command lspci:

lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8T800Pro Host Bridge
00:00.1 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8T800Pro Host Bridge
00:00.2 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8T800Pro Host Bridge
00:00.3 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8T800Pro Host Bridge
00:00.4 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8T800Pro Host Bridge
00:00.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8T800Pro Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI bridge [K8T800/K8T890 South]
00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8251 AHCI/SATA 4-Port Controller
00:0f.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 07)
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 90)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 90)
00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 90)
00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 90)
00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 90)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8251 PCI to ISA Bridge
00:11.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8251 Ultra VLINK Controller
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 7c)
00:13.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8251 Host Bridge
00:13.1 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8251 PCI to PCI Bridge
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 4000] (rev c1)
02:00.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8251 PCIE Root Port
02:00.1 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8251 PCIE Root Port
02:01.0 Audio device: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT1708/A [Azalia HDAC] (VIA High Definition Audio Controller)
05:0d.0 Communication controller: Agere Systems LT WinModem



Result from the command lsdev:

Device DMA IRQ I/O Ports
------------------------------------------------
0000:00:0f.0 e400-e40f e480-e483 e800-e807 e880-e883 ec00-ec07
0000:00:0f.1 0170-0177 01f0-01f7 0376-0376 03f6-03f6 fc00-fc0f
0000:00:10.0 e080-e09f
0000:00:10.1 e000-e01f
0000:00:10.2 dc00-dc1f
0000:00:10.3 d880-d89f
0000:00:12.0 d400-d4ff
0000:05:0d.0 c800-c8ff cc00-cc07
acpi 9
ACPI 0800-0803 0804-0805 0808-080b 0820-0823 5010-5015
ahci e400-e40f e480-e483 e800-e807 e880-e883 ec00-ec07
cascade 4
dma 0080-008f
dma1 0000-001f
dma2 00c0-00df
eth0 23
fpu 00f0-00ff
hda_intel 17
i8042 1 12
IO-APIC-edge 4
keyboard 0060-0060 0064-0064
nouveau 16
pata_via 14 15 0170-0177 01f0-01f7 0376-0376 03f6-03f6 fc00-fc0f
PCI 0000-ffff 0cf8-0cff c000-cfff
pic1 0020-0021
pic2 00a0-00a1
pnp 03e0-03e7 0400-041f 04d0-04d1 0800-087f 0a20-0a2f 0a30-0a3f 0c00-0c0f 0d00-0d0f
rtc0 8 0070-0071
serial 03f8-03ff
timer 0
timer0 0040-0043
timer1 0050-0053
uhci_hcd d880-d89f dc00-dc1f e000-e01f e080-e09f
uhci_hcd:usb2 20
uhci_hcd:usb3 22
uhci_hcd:usb4 21
vga+ 03c0-03df
via-rhine d400-d4ff

The commands above were run in Porteus 1.0, with my custom kernel. If it helps, I can post my .config file, with my custom kernel configuration, which I saved after I got a good kernel for MYSELF.

If you run Slax, can you see your drive in /proc/partitions?

The folder /proc was empty. There was no folder partitions inside /proc.

While my custom kernel in Porteus 1.0 recognizes my harddisk as sda and my flash drive as sdb, Slax kernel recognizes my flash drive as sda and does not recognize my harddisk.

I am very happy to say that my custom kernel, from Porteus 1.0, worked normally in Slax, with your initramfs. It even recognized my harddisk.