Linux floppies

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October 24th, 2001, 06:17 PM
casper3699

Linux floppies

This may sound dumb but I have a 486 DX 50 Compaq Laptop, with 250 MB harddrive, 1 floppy drive and no cdrom. Is there a way that i could install linux on it using only floppies? And if there is where could I find the place to do that?
Any help would be appreciated.:)
October 24th, 2001, 06:30 PM
gaxprels

I have two recommendations:
1) get a cdrom
2) get a network card

If you can afford a cdrom (my laptop uses a pcmcia external cdrom) you can use the pcmcia floppy with Slakware to install. If you get a network card, you can put the cd in another computer and use NFS to install (Slakware also supports this). The reason I recommend Slak is it tends to be a little more compact and has everything you should need. You probably don't want to run X on a laptop that old. Mine is a P100 with a 1.2G hard drive and 16M of RAM. I can run X effectively IF I use WindowMaker. (It's a little lighter than some of the others that come with Slak.) If you have problems with the latest version of Slak, you may need to find an older version. 4.0 and below use the older Glib libraries that aren't as bloated. Hope this helps.
Happy Hacking
October 24th, 2001, 06:34 PM
xstonedogx

I had no problems installing and running slackware 3.5 on a 386 using only floppies.
October 24th, 2001, 06:51 PM
casper3699

I cant access any of the ftp servers to download from. Where do I go when I get to one?

I tried a CDROM through the parrallel port but when I setup the harddrive as NFS my cdrom doesn't work anymore.
October 24th, 2001, 07:22 PM
xstonedogx

Here's an HTTP mirror:http://telia.dl.sourceforge.net/mirrors/slackware/

And here's installation info:
http://www.slackware.com/install/
October 25th, 2001, 01:41 AM
petemcevoy

Slackware rocks, there's no doubt about that, but you should also be aware of debian - available from http://www.debian.org , there's also detailed instructions on how to do an install over the net using http or ftp. I've just put slink onto 2 386's somebody was going to throw away - takes a while to boot but it runs ok.

Trinux available from http://www.trinux.org/ is a hella good security based distro, 2 floppies and a dhcp server on you lan and your away - might seem a bit tricky if your newish to linux though.