I acquired this fine little gem for free. It was bone stock with an old install of Windows 95. I installed Win98 but with only 16meg of ram it was way to slow in my opinion. I had been messing around with Linux for a few months on my desktop, and was very impressed. After reading alot of forums and other information on the Internet, I figured I could find something for the little laptop.
The first thing I tried was Knoppix. I was amazed with the way it was able to detect almost any hardware, contained a full operating system, and yet run off a cd. Well, I found two problems with this, 1) The Compaq was a little short on memory and 2) The 14x CD-ROM was just way too slow for such a large distro like Knoppix. This was when I upgraded the ram.
After doing some hunting around, I found several smaller, lightweight distros. Slax, Puppy, and Vector, just to name a few. I found that distros that used KDE or Gnome derivative desktops didn't run well on the Compaq due to the slower processor, and some had a hard time properly configuring for the NeoMagic graphics card leaving the display was unusable. I eventually came across Damn Small Linux around its 0.9.3 release. After following this distribution up to their 2.0 release, I have been very impressed with the quality of it.
Damn Small Linux is a LiveCD distribution that can be installed to the hard drive, becoming a Debian system. When you boot from the CD, you are given the option to enter boot command (press F2 or F3 for available commands) to control how the system boots. I used the boot command fb800x600. This boots in frame buffer mode which works well with the NeoMagic graphics card. You will want to select Xfbdev xserver when it comes up. The choice of USB mouse comes up and that is up to you. The touchpad does not work "out of the box" but can later be configured after adding the XFree86 extension. Having a mouse around does make installation a little easier, but installation is completely possible without one. If you want to use a mouse, it needs to be plugged in before booting, so it will be detected and installed. Select your keyboard, and your going. In a few seconds the X server will boot, and now it's time to install. The steps to installing differ a bit, so I have outlined them both in detail below.
Well, the screen looks great, but you can't move the cursor. Time to break out a few keyboard commands. Ctrl-Alt-BackSpace to get out of X and back to the command line. If you haven't already prepared the hard drive for installation the first command would be sudo cfdisk. This is a good, basic program for setting up the partitioning on the hard drive. I set up the first partition as 100mb of swap, and left the rest as Linux. Use the command sudo mkswap /dev/hda1 (assuming that your swap is partition 1) to activate the newly formed swap partition. The next command is sudo dsl-hdinstall. This will start a small script that will install DSL to your hard drive. I chose the older ext2 filesystem ("n" on the ext3 question) and Lilo for the boot loader. The system will now ask if you wish to reboot. For some reason, when I chose to reboot, the system would shut down properly, but on reboot, the display would not work initially (I had to manually shut off the computer, and turn it back on). To remedy this, I chose not to reboot which will return you to the command line. Enter the command sudo shutdown -h now. This will shutdown the computer completely. You can now restart the computer and boot from the harddrive where you will be presented with choosing your root password, and your user password (Your username is already "dsl" by default). The X server will automatically start. Since the touchpad is not functional yet you will need to Ctrl-Alt-BackSpace to get back to the command line.
Now you can work on getting the touchpad working. At this point you should now have XFree86.dsl and XF86Config-4 downloaded to your home directory, or on CD from another computer. (If they are on CD copy them to your home directory). Use the command mydsl-load XFree86.dsl to load XFree86 onto your system. Move the file XF86Config file to the appropriate directory with the command sudo mv XF86Config-4 /etc/X11. Use "vi", (a simple text editor) to edit the file .xserverrc (vi .xserverrc) to say exec /usr/X11R6/bin/XFree86 -nolisten tcp. With luck, you should now be ready to boot into the X server with a working touchpad. Make sure you are back in the "dsl" home directory and enter startx . The X server should load, and you will be presented with Fluxbox, and a working touchpad.
You may have noticed that the sound controls are not active in the lower corner of the screen. This is an easy problem to overcome. Open ATerminal and run the command sudo modprobe sb. Restart the X server, and the sound should now be active.
Created November 24, 2005