floppy disk install

[Keshik]

Hi,
I just picked up this old PoS laptop for free 😀 and am looking to see if I can put linux on it. However, all the thing has is a floppy drive and 350mb of total hard drive space (8mb ram). Are there any versions that I could do this with? Thanks

 

[NetRyder]

You could do a Slackware install using NFS if the laptop has a network card. Here's the official install guide:
http://www.slackware.com/install/

EDIT: Didn't notice this at first, but 8MB RAM seems to be a little too less, even for a basic installation.
FreeBSD should work, although probably not very well either: http://www.freebsd.org

 

[cpugeniusmv]

i installed slackware 9.1 on my 50 mhz laptop with 5 MB of ram today.

i followed relatively closely with this guide:

http://website.lineone.net/~brichardson/linux/4mb_laptops/4mb_Laptops.html

if you need any specific help, i'd be happy to oblige you 😀

 

[Keshik]

cpu, did you use the floppy install or the network install? this site does look quite promising though 🙂 how does it run? I might have to wait a week or so to be able to install the dif os though...

 

[SPeedY_B]

Pico BSD: http://people.freebsd.org/~picobsd/picobsd.html 😀

 

[sean.ferguson]

a list of floppy based distro's: http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Floppy/

 

[cpugeniusmv]

cpu, did you use the floppy install or the network install? this site does look quite promising though 🙂 how does it run? I might have to wait a week or so to be able to install the dif os though...

i did the network install. here are the basic steps i took:

create 3 partitions with partition magic boot floppies (24 MB swap, a 10 MB ext2 at the end of the drive, and everything else in the middle goes into another ext2 partition.)

copy root floppy to small partition at end of disk. (i used a weird method to do this...i'll explain more later)

set up NFS server with slackware packages on my XP machine. I tried setting up an NFS server on my other slackware box, and it worked...but for some reason it wouldn't install from that one. So, I used a free trial of Omni-NFS Server ( http://www.xlink.com/nfs_products/NFS_Server/NFS_Server.htm )

I booted the laptop from the bare.i boot disk with the option mount root=/dev/hda3 rw and went through the normal setup process.

the main thing you have to watch out for is package selection. if you don't need it, don't select it. hard disk space is precious.

another weird obstacle that i ran into was that the bare.i bootdisk did not have APM support on it...so i had to tap a key on the keyboard (i chose shift) every few minutes in order to keep the hard drive from spinning down.

but now it's running fine. i'm using bash shell, running sshd, proftpd, and an opendchub (extended family shares pictures and home movies on it.)

pretty handy 🙂

 

[NetRyder]

Wow...I didn't expect Slack to run on a machine with 5MB of RAM. Superb!

 

[cpugeniusmv]

Wow...I didn't expect Slack to run on a machine with 5MB of RAM. Superb!

neither did i! lol

 

[sean.ferguson]

+1 to things i must do before i die list

**Must Install Slackware on a "POS" Lappie... prefferably with 5MB of RAM 😀

 

[X-Istence]

+1 to things i must do before i die list

**Must Install Slackware on a "POS" Lappie... prefferably with 5MB of RAM 😀

And learn how to use "ps aux" to check up on the status of any program running including apache.

 

[Geffy]

lol X-Istence
Also another tip for nix users "press tab while you are typing a command name or path, and it will be autocompleted for you" 😉 😉

I tried to install nix on a lappy once, but the only CDRom it had was SCSI and even with windows wasnt detected til right before it went from DOS to Windows and the network card (PCMCIA) wasnt autodetected either, so I couldnt do a network install. In the end I just gave up. Twas a 75Mhz, with 32MB of Ram and 315MB hard drive