for clarification, does your mention of "goat" reference this user?

https://dev1galaxy.org/search.php?action=show_user_posts&user_id=6999

regardless, comment wherever you feel is most appropriate for your subject(s)/topic(s)

would agree with steve_v and post number fortyfour.

believe your booting issues are a result of multiple issues.

cmos battery(whichever type internally) is depleted. some machines will not even boot without proper/sufficient cmos voltage.

here is a link that should show similar cmos battery installation/location(s) but remember every machine is different location-wise.

https://www.amazon.com/BZBYCZH-Battery-Compatible-Toshiba-A7-S712/dp/B0B51NBHDR/

your description of boot messages beginning with "PXE" seem to indicate that the bios is set to check for pxe-booting(most bios have settings to turn pxe-booting off but with a depleted cmos battery any bios settings you change will be lost when the machine is off_and_disconnected_from_mains_electricity)

your swap question has several answers. if you are dual-booting with windows you will put it wherever you made space for the non-windows stuff. if you are NOT dual-booting then for spinning rust it is best to have the swap at the beginning(first partition for non-eufi machines or second partition for eufi machines, iirc) and as long as you have plenty of hdd space stay with the "ram times 2" calculation for simplicity and as a "rule_of_thumb"

hopefully this makes sense and is helpful in some fashion. good luck and continue to keep us posted on your progress.

a brief story in your local broadsheet or even something you print out and put on corkboards in the marketplaces should help in knocking the dust off of residents retired equipment and you should end up with more than you can put to use right away. if you have trouble sourcing enough locally give the forum a shout.

from the link provided in the OP:

sudo apt-get install bison coreutils curl flex gcc g++ libncurses-dev libnss3-dev libssl-dev m4 make p7zip-full patch pkg-config unzip wget xxd zlib1g-dev git

you can always email Mike Banon to confirm that a clean fresh install of Devuan was used for this project(and that no "snaps" were present and/or used/utilized in this endeavour).

********************************************************************

edited to add a link to a possibly related reddit(6 years old though):

https://www.reddit.com/r/coreboot/comments/bhf96e/lenovo_g505s_good_stepbystep_guide_on_how_to/?rdt=41619

searching DDG shows multiple results using "raspberry pi 4 usb booting"(quotation marks only added for forum clarity, not used for the search)

while you are experimenting with ram you can also consider the possibility of some sort of solid-state internal storage to replace the spinning rust. if you don't care about portability then even more options are viable. wireless strength was hit and miss in those days so, again, if it doesn't need to be portable a hard line is much preferred. great to hear you are having some success in your endeavours.

@mtbvfr

grabbed a lenovo y580 laptop which has the same era internals as your dell latitude e6530 and booted daedalus liveusb. in the accessories section of the menu you should find Xfburn. it has a "Burn Image" function that writes .ISO to CDs and DVDs properly.

that being said, your 2005 Toshiba Tecra A7 Intel Centrino Duo machine with 512MB of ram will not perform enjoyably and/or satisfactorily with the vast majority of current *nix/bsd/etc. distributions. if the machine won't boot from usb media and you don't want to burn through a bunch of cd/dvd disks(harder to find and more expensive these days), probably the best course of action is to learn how to physically remove the hard drive and use a usb adapter to properly format, partition, and install some lightweight stuff so you can both achieve some success and gain some valuable experience, insight, and troubleshooting acumen.

current lightweight offerings include distros like FreeDOS, Puppy Linux, Slitaz, Tiny Core Linux, and the like.

hopefully this helps. keep us posted on your progress.

machines in that era were hit and miss regarding usb booting. sometimes only one of the ports was bootable. if you are able to access the bios setup area where the boot devices/order settings are then you can insert the usb stick in each port and cold-boot the machine to the bios settings area and see if the usb stick shows up in the boot order list. as was suggested earlier in the thread, if you have experience burning and booting cds and/or other lightweight *nix distros you will probably figure things out. good luck and keep us posted!

so the systemd guy worked for military-industrial-complex-contractor-redhat...
and now works for military-industrial-complex-contractor-microsoft...
and what he works on is part of this thing where millions of lives are in the balance:

is it just me or does anyone else think this will end badly?   :rolleyes:   :wavingarmswildly:

quote

from

~$ apt info gnat
Package: gnat
Version: 12.2
Priority: optional
Section: devel
Maintainer: Ludovic Brenta <lbrenta@debian.org>
Installed-Size: 14.3 kB
Depends: gnat-12
Suggests: ada-reference-manual-2012
Tag: devel::compiler, devel::lang:ada, implemented-in::ada,
 implemented-in::c, interface::commandline, role::dummy, role::program,
 scope::utility, suite::gnu, works-with::software:source
Download-Size: 4,716 B
APT-Sources: http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus/main amd64 Packages
Description: GNU Ada compiler
 GNAT is a full-featured Ada 2012 compiler.  A quote from
 http://www.adaic.org says: "Easily reused and maintained, readable
 and user friendly, Ada code facilitates such massive software
 projects as the Space Station and the Paris Metro. It has proven to
 be extraordinarily robust in decades' worth of daily field tests
 under the most rigorous conditions in which millions of lives have
 been at stake."  Ada is the language for real-world, mission-critical
 programming.
 .
 At the same time, Ada's radical type safety helps novice programmers
 avoid many common mistakes and deliver their software on time (see
 http://www.adaic.org/atwork/trains.html).
 .
 This empty package depends on the default version of the Ada compiler
 for Debian, which is part of the GNU Compiler Collection. Its
 enforces the same version for all Ada compilations, as described in
 the Debian Ada Policy.

seems dangerous to let the ai-bots hack away at such critical code. shazbot.

you might take a closer look at /etc/default/networking(on our daedalus the CONFIGURE_INTERFACES=yes is commented out)

# Configuration for networking init script being run during
# the boot sequence

# Set to 'no' to skip interfaces configuration on boot
#CONFIGURE_INTERFACES=yes

# Don't configure these interfaces. Shell wildcards supported/
#EXCLUDE_INTERFACES=

# Set to 'yes' to enable additional verbosity
#VERBOSE=no

# Method to wait for the network to become online,
# for services that depend on a working network:
# - ifup: wait for ifup to have configured an interface.
# - route: wait for a route to a given address to appear.
# - ping/ping6: wait for a host to respond to ping packets.
# - none: don't wait.
#WAIT_ONLINE_METHOD=ifup

# Which interface to wait for.
# If none given, wait for all auto interfaces, or if there are none,
# wait for at least one hotplug interface.
#WAIT_ONLINE_IFACE=

# Which address to wait for for route, ping and ping6 methods.
# If none is given for route, it waits for a default gateway.
#WAIT_ONLINE_ADDRESS=

# Timeout in seconds for waiting for the network to come online.
#WAIT_ONLINE_TIMEOUT=300