plpbt.iso crashes on boot on Compaq Presario 2100 with frozen menu

[cosmicaug]

Hi,


I just wanted to try various low resource requirement Linux distros from a USB drive on this machine, a Compaq Presario 2100, chained from a boot manager on a cd (since USB ports are not bootable on this machine) and remembered having found and tried this wonderful program a couple of years back. However, I cannot get the default plpbt.iso to work.

It boots fine until the menu shows up. The menu animation is frozen as is the star field animation and the computer appears unresponsive to keyboard input. This happens every time that I have tried it but I'll admit I have not tried it dozens of times (maybe I tried it 3 or 4 times).

Since all I needed was a way to boot to USB, I used the option of creating a custom iso from a plpbt.bin modified with plpcfgbt to configure a hidden boot booting the usb drive and therefore I have achieved what I wanted. Nevertheless, I thought it might be good to create a post about it in case it is helpful.

As an additional note, which may or may not be useful, the first distro I have tried this way was ChrunchBang (32-bit Waldorf for Modern PCs) and the menu to choose whether to run the image as a live cd or as an installation cd was similarly frozen.

[cosmicaug]

Hi,


I just wanted to try various low resource requirement Linux distros from a USB drive on this machine, a Compaq Presario 2100, chained from a boot manager on a cd (since USB ports are not bootable on this machine) and remembered having found and tried this wonderful program a couple of years back. However, I cannot get the default plpbt.iso to work.

It boots fine until the menu shows up. The menu animation is frozen as is the star field animation and the computer appears unresponsive to keyboard input. This happens every time that I have tried it but I'll admit I have not tried it dozens of times (maybe I tried it 3 or 4 times).

Since all I needed was a way to boot to USB, I used the option of creating a custom iso from a plpbt.bin modified with plpcfgbt to configure a hidden boot booting the usb drive and therefore I have achieved what I wanted. Nevertheless, I thought it might be good to create a post about it in case it is helpful.

As an additional note, which may or may not be useful, the first distro I have tried this way was ChrunchBang (32-bit Waldorf for Modern PCs) and the menu to choose whether to run the image as a live cd or as an installation cd was similarly frozen.

Please ignore the additional note. This is not correct (or, if it ever was, it may not be reproducible).

[Elmar]

hello,

its difficult to say why the boot manager hangs. in your case use plopkexec as alternative. it should boot your linux distros.

best regards
elmar