[ale] Getting Linux on an old laptop with only floppy drive and 100 MB Iomega zip drive

[James P. Kinney III]

Take the drive out of the laptop and put it into a drive to USB adapter.
Plug that into another working machine and boot up an install CD. You
may need to be careful during the drive selection stuff to pick the
external drive.

A million year old laptop should be checked first against the linux
laptops site to see if any one else has made it work. Without CD or
networking, it will be a nearly a brick. I suspect it also has no USB.

A later post discussed boot floppy and PCMCIA nic and then thin client
mode. Yes, it will work. You will need to a pretty extensive overhaul of
the boot floppy as you will need to build a custom kernel with the pc
card drivers in the initrd and then you will need to NFS mount a /
partition from the server to be able to get X going. The etherboot is a
bit different from the PXE boot process and it also doesn't load a
kernel directly. So you will need to fully boot a Linux kernel (and skip
etherboot and PXE completely).

Now it may be easier to go out first and get a PCMCIA nic and use the
Zip drive to boot a boot image with. That may be enough to find the nic,
load drivers and the net install from there. The problem is the modern
distros are quite heavy. 128MB RAM is the barest minimum these days. So
you would need to go back a bit (way back. Way, way back) to get a
release that will be usable on that class of machine. I don't recommend
working this process with the current darling, Ubuntu. Instead, look at
Debian itself. (I won't recommend RedHat/Fedora/Suse/Mandriva because of
the complications of libs/packages/dependancies - Slackware would
probably also be a decent choice here but as it has no easy package
management it is for seasoned, grizzled, ornery old curmudgen *NIX
people :). Debian has a barebones installer that will let you use the
Internet repositories as an install source. 

Or you could use the laptop as a paperweight...

On Tue, 2008-01-29 at 14:31 +0000, dhhoward at comcast.net wrote:
> I've got an old Win98 Toshiba satellite that I want to put Linux on, but no CD ROM drive and no Internet, but I can get it to talk to an old Iomega 100 MB Zip drive.  Any way to take an Ubuntu CD-ROM iso image and chop it up into 100 MB chunks for copying to the laptop or installing from the Zip drive?
> 
> Thanks, 
> Daniel
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> 
-- 
James P. Kinney III          
CEO & Director of Engineering 
Local Net Solutions,LLC        
770-493-8244                    
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
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