Devuan 5 not Booting on 2005 Toshiba Tecra A7 Intel Centrino Duo

greenjeans · 2024-12-03 17:17:33

There is still documentation on the refracta website:
https://refracta.org/docs/readme.refracta2usb.txt
Have no idea how current it is . . .

As fsmithred once told me, it is for sure a huge swiss army knife of a program, but it can be confusing because it has so many options and things it can do, so there's a learning curve. I asked him at one point why it wasn't still around but can't remember what he said about that.

I have a couple different USB sticks I made with it, one just a standard liveUSB, one with persistence. I also have a stick that I did a conventional install one with a swap partition and all just for an experiment, but I think I just used Refracta-installer to do that one.

fsmithred · Yesterday 01:30:26

It is still around, but it's not in the repo. That would require some re-coding, and I'm afraid to mess with it.
This is only useful for live-isos, not for installer isos:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/refrac … b/download

mtbvfr · Yesterday 01:35:17

So guys what's the proper way to use wodim?

Should the command be the following?

wodim -eject dev=/dev/sr0 filename.iso

stargate-sg1-cheyenne-mtn · Yesterday 09:48:44

@mtbvfr

I was using Devuan 5 on a Dell Latitude 6530 to attempt to write to the DVD.

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.

greenjeans · Yesterday 23:39:59

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)

Actually they seem cheaper than ever, its what I have used for 15 years, and the nice thing is I have a stack of isos going all the way back with everything I ever did, and every distro I ever tried and liked enough to keep, all on solid media that will never be corrupted as long as I don't have a house fire, lol.

Honestly on a machine as old as the OP's, that's a better choice.

But you're right, 512 mb is gonna be tough. Especially if he wants to try and run a browser. If he had just a gig at least, Vuu-do and a lot of others would work. I've run the old Vuu-do maximal in an old machine with 1 gig, and loaded the liveCD into ram and it worked great, but that was the old 1.07 with the old version of Palemoon.

ETA: What would work great, is Puppy linux from around 2010-2011 or so, before Barry quit for a while and the community bloated the living crap out of it.

Last edited by greenjeans (Yesterday 23:42:52)

Babarosa · Today 00:26:38

A few weeks ago I installed Devuan 5 i386 by using the netinstall iso on a system consisting of an AsRock K7VT4A Pro motherboard built 2005 with an Athlon XP 3000+ processor and 2 GB of RAM.
The system performs stable and is definitely usuable (using office programs, playing back music, digitizing movie DVDs, recording MIDI and audio, ...). Newly booted, it uses 392 MB of RAM. Web browsing although is a bit slow, opening more than one tab is not advisable. Watching DVD movies is not possible (at least with the momentarily used video card Radeon 9200).

As already written, 512 MB of RAM is tough.

Last edited by Babarosa (Today 00:31:58)

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#26 2024-12-03 17:17:33

Re: Devuan 5 not Booting on 2005 Toshiba Tecra A7 Intel Centrino Duo

#27 Yesterday 01:30:26

Re: Devuan 5 not Booting on 2005 Toshiba Tecra A7 Intel Centrino Duo

#28 Yesterday 01:35:17

Re: Devuan 5 not Booting on 2005 Toshiba Tecra A7 Intel Centrino Duo

#29 Yesterday 09:48:44

Re: Devuan 5 not Booting on 2005 Toshiba Tecra A7 Intel Centrino Duo

#30 Yesterday 23:39:59

Re: Devuan 5 not Booting on 2005 Toshiba Tecra A7 Intel Centrino Duo

#31 Today 00:26:38

Re: Devuan 5 not Booting on 2005 Toshiba Tecra A7 Intel Centrino Duo

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