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Thread: Linux floppies

  1. #1
    Senior Member
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    Sep 2001
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    800

    Unhappy 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.
    [gloworange]\"A hacker is someone who has a passion for technology, someone who is possessed by a desire to figure out how things work.\" [/gloworange]

  2. #2
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Jul 2001
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    138
    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
    -----------------------------------------------------
    Warfare is the Way of deception.
    -Sun Tzu \"The Art of War\"

  3. #3
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    Sep 2001
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    I had no problems installing and running slackware 3.5 on a 386 using only floppies.

  4. #4
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    Sep 2001
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    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.
    [gloworange]\"A hacker is someone who has a passion for technology, someone who is possessed by a desire to figure out how things work.\" [/gloworange]

  5. #5
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  6. #6
    Senior Member
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    Sep 2001
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    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.

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