I was trying to get Debian on my Toshiba Portege 610CT via netinstall through floppy, but no go. The installer entered low memory mode and warned of problematic behavior. It recognized my NIC fine and I was downloading the files fine. The problem came when it was time to partition- my hard drive was not recognized but the floppy was. I tried loading drivers for IDE, but anyone have any idea where I went wrong? Is it just the fact that I have low (24MB) RAM? Please let me know, as I have managed to get Tiny Linux on the box but so far am not very impressed as the network does not work yet. I think Debian would be the absolute best distro for this little box, and so far I'm sad that it hasn't worked. I tried to install Slackware, but as I'm a noob, I didn't know what to do when it asked for the network info. I did manage to get Basic Linux going on the thing, but network didn't work there either. Should I just suck it up and buy more RAM, or is there a workaround? Thanks a lot!

More ram would not hurt but i dont know about the network.

So far the info I've read makes me sad. It's been pretty hard to get a distro on this laptop. I tried Tiny Linux and that seemed to work, but after the 14 floppy installation I think I was supposed to continue the installation via network which did not work. As I said Slackware didn't work and neither did Debian. This last one I was disappointed about. There is pretty much only one account of GNU/Linux running well on this laptop and the distro was Debian. I suppose the thing that made me the most sad was that Debian may be doing permanent damage to the hardware because of lack of fan support which causes the laptop to run warm all the time. Obviously if one buys an old laptop and want's to put Linux on it, I don't think they expect to use it as their only computer, but I would want even a project PC to be safe. I'll probably let this thing sit for a long time until I figure out what to do. My goal was to get a Linux laptop for under $50, which I would've done if it werent for this little problem. Upgrading the RAM would cost more than the computer itself so that's probably not gonna happen soon. At least things are not so bleak on the desktop and with newer hardware.

Part of your problem may be with the base install of Debian not loading the driver for your network card. Even with a purely text install, Debian may be difficult to install. Have you tried Deli Linix? Its specifically made for modest hardware. Here is a link for you.

http://www.delilinux.de/

good luck.

Joe

Actually yes, I have tried DeliLinux and almost every other type of floppy-based distro. The problem for me was that the installer could not load the modules for my network card. The Debian installer, on the other hand, could and I saw all the lights blinking. I figured Debian would be better as it is more well supported and not considered "beta". Thanks anyways. What I was thinking of doing was making a distro from scratch or something, but not until maybe a year or two after I master Unix/Linux.