floppy disk install

Keshik

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Joined
16 Mar 2004
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110
Hi,
I just picked up this old PoS laptop for free :D 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
 
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
 
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...
 
Keshik said:
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 :)
 
Wow...I didn't expect Slack to run on a machine with 5MB of RAM. Superb!
laugh.gif
 
+1 to things i must do before i die list

**Must Install Slackware on a "POS" Lappie... prefferably with 5MB of RAM :D
 
thekore said:
+1 to things i must do before i die list

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

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

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Also Hi EP and people. I found this place again while looking through a oooollllllldddd backup. I have filled over 10TB and was looking at my collection of antiques. Any bids on the 500Mhz Win 95 fix?
Any of the SP crew still out there?
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Just did some crude math and I apparently joined almost 18yrs ago, how is that possible???
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