Reply #13: Maybe it just boots incredibly slowly or maybe there's a command line option you can use? [View All]

[struggle4progress]

It's not quite the same thing, but I've just experimentally tried slitaz in virtualbox with very little memory on an 8gb virtual harddrive and a 320x200x15 virtual screen. This isn't really a fair test, because virtualbox will use one of my 2.8ghz cores; if I want to emulate the slow little arm cpu, I'd need a different platform (maybe qemu). I picked slitaz because the livecd is quite small -- say 30mb. I can get the slitaz livecd to boot in virtualbox for a a 320x200x15 virtual screen with 136mb ram but it freezes up at 128mb ram, and I can only get a command line boot, which runs out of memory and kills processes if I try "startx"

The poor little zipit has only 32gb ram. That's really not much. Even with 128mb of ram in virtualbox, it takes a few minutes for a livecd of Damn Small Linux to produce a desktop, and the desktop isn't very responsive at all; the situation is even worse for Damn Small Linux with only 32mb ram: it'll boot to a desktop, but it's not snappy. People doing quick dirty unoptimized hacks of existing distros into the zipit may be using additional tricks to get the sucker to boot. If you have any option to use the command line before you get to the image screen, or if a command line eventually pops up after the image screen, the experienced zipit hackers might be able to give you some pointers about configuring your boot successfully.