Beanworks

Awright! Got it up and running ! (The DeLi homepage is here)

The install was pretty straightforward, text based. There is a nice installation instruction page on the DeLi wiki. It pretty much recognized everything (at least as far as I can see right now). At the bottom of the Instruction page, it says,

• After the packages are installed remove the CD-ROM (the disk, not the drive itself) and press CRTL+ALT+DEL to boot into your new DeLi Linux system

• Log in as root with the password you chose before. Now you can run delisetup to configure your system.

Uh huh, delisetup. Well, that’s where xconfig resides, which is what you need to get a graphical user interface. So I took a deep breath, and tried to gingerly step into the xconfig section of delisetup. It actually wasn’t that bad, even though I had very little information about the monitor and video card (other than the fact that it is not a separate card, and the system is circa 1997). I went back and forth a couple times, trying to make sure I got it right, held my breath again and finished the setup. It took me back to the command prompt.

I stared at it for awhile trying to remember the command to start Xwindows. Checked my cheatsheet card, looked for my pocket Linux book (which, now that I recall, my son borrowed, so it’s probably buried under a pile of God knows what), gave up and decided to go back to book reviews. As I was scanning the Mandrakelinux Discovery 10.1 book I was working on, I happened to spot an entry about entering a command if the graphical version was not displaying: “startx.” Good grief. How could I not remember that? Bingo, we’ve got graphics now!

I poked around a bit, but couldn’t find a utility to set up users, so I’m in there as “root” (normally not a good thing) until I change the settings via the command line interface.

Bottom line: Hey, it works on a 1997 Compaq with 32MB of memory: I don’t think I was really testing its limits! During the install process it asked about using the free space on the disk (which has Windows98 on it, and had over 1GB of free space). On reboot, it actually booted into Win98 because I wasn’t there to choose Linux from the bootloader at startup. Overall,

• Ease of install = medium
• Knowledge required = some knowledge, or a Linux reference, will be really helpful
• Features = limited, but acceptable (this is for low memory machines, after all!)