i wish to use a form of linux on my lowly laptop it is a latitued LT so only has a pentinum 133 mmx and 64mb of ram. i wish to see of it is possible to install some form of bootloader so that i can boot from a usb as although the LT has a floppy it does not work and the cd drives have no adaptor or interface card (never tested them either) would be nice to have a trim distro running as it struggles with firefox on 98 even though i have replaced the explorer with bblean
i am not too bothered as to the distro i do use but i want something that will support most of the LT's hardware think this goes without saying but it also must have usb mass storage support

it would be fantastic if you could help

Does the BIOS have the capability to boot from USB?

For such an old laptor I would recommend DamnSmall Linux. Alternatively you could try to use the older version of one of the big distros.

unforunatly there is no boot from usb option however if grub can be used to boot from usb then i could get a friend to use his laptop to install grub thanks for the dam small linux sergestion i was planing to try that if i could get the boot from usb function working. i did see what the windows emulated version would run like. It was like trying to run xp on it!! not sure if there is a bios update to boot from usb but i am not sure. Unfortunatly i would need a working floppy drive in order to do this if you see any for sale on ebay.co.uk let us know they are soo difficult to find at reasonable prices (sub £30) thanls for your help so far and keep the ideas coming

I am also wondering if there's a way to tell grub to boot up a usb drive....I don't know the reason for this, but I downloaded and burned puppy-linux, ran it, did the install to usbpen thing...everything came out fine. I took it and put it in my laptop and it ran perfectly. When I try to boot from my desktop though, it reads the drive as a USB FDD, and bypasses grub and boots up Windows XP. To me it looks obvious that my BIOS is reading the flash drive, but what it's doing is what I don't know. My partitions are:

/dev/hda1 Boot Partition for Windows
/dev/hda2 swap
/dev/hda3 root
/dev/hdb1 Windows XP
/dev/hdb2 home

Any help on telling me why my comp is being finicky is appreciated. By the way, it's an AMD K7S5A motherboard with a AMD 1800+ chip in it.

i have actualy been experimenting with grub booting a ubuntu from a usb hd it boots but then has a nasty kernel panic about pivot_root not existing did you write the bootsector correctly in the sub stick? just an idea but boot grub then see if you can get in the command line and then with the stick in do "geology hd<tab>" this should give all drives possible if it can find the disc it may mean you can boot it ok


anyone know if it is possible to install a bootloader without a floppy disk drive or cd rom drive i have usb but cannot boot with it :'( win98 is on there though