Damn Small Linux boot issues

[HyperHacker]

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I installed DSL on my old test machine, a 200mhz Pentium with 64MB RAM. Now I know I shouldn't exactly expect stellar performance out of that, but 10 minutes to boot? Something's wrong there. Win98 didn't even take that long. It's not overheating; the air coming off the CPU fan is actually cold.

During the boot process it spends a terrible amount of time "autodetecting devices" before informing me that autodetection hangs and I should check the BIOS settings. What would I check?

Finally, the system boots into an outrageously slow X desktop. Do not want. For this machine I just want to boot to a command line. How do I fix that?

[Lakshmipathi]

I'm not sure about why it's too slow.may be check the RAM and CPU requirement for DSL. (Check puppy linux,it might suit you)
If you want to disable X,(i assume) edit /etc/inittab file.
Make a file backup before you edit.

id:5:initdefault:

Set the default runlevel to 3 rather than 5.

id:3:initdefault:

Save, reboot.

[rokytnji]

Try using different boot options supplied by the DSL Wiki

Cheat Codes - DSL Wiki

[Lakshmipathi]

I came across these two links about minimal distro.
Minimal Linux distros - OLPC
http://www.minimalinux.org/ttylinux/...User_Guide.pdf

[HyperHacker]

Well I tried runlevel 3 in lilo.conf and that didn't do anything different. Then I got to looking at those other minimal distros. TTYLinux seems more like what I need, but it hangs at generating an SSH key. It does say it will take a while, but 15+ minutes? I don't even need SSH on that box so is there some way to disable that?

I would suspect that something's wrong with the hardware, but Win98 (or 95, I honestly don't remember ) ran fine before I installed DSL.

All I really want to do is boot straight into a command line where I can run a program of mine that will allow me to control I/O over the parallel port and display the status in a nice text interface (likely using ncurses). I don't want to use Windows/DOS for this because I suspect they're doing something odd with the port instead of giving me full control, and I need to know that my program works on Linux.