I managed to acquire a really old laptop, a Toshiba Satellite 110CS, 800mb HDD, and I'm planning on turning it into a Digital Picture Frame. Seemed like a great idea until I realised that this laptop has no CD Drive, no network port, etc, and I'm not about to shell out money buying PCMCIA cards. I was wondering how I should go about installing some light form of linux on it.

I've got no problem with putting the laptop HDD in my desktop PC to set it up (Yes I have the converter to regular IDE), is it possible to copy installation files to the HDD, and boot off a linux boot-disk floppy? or perhaps even create a boot partition on the HDD?

I realise this probably depends heavily on which distribution of linux, so any suggestions for what would work best in this setup?

thanks

800mb is quite small. I can't recommend you ubuntu, it needs at least 1.8 GB. But I managed to install a graphical ubuntu which needed about 1GB. The problem is, you've got to have some experience, that means first do the base (server) install and then install xserver and other packages you need.

Debian has got boot floppies, too, i cant tell you about other distributions. Its a little bit more difficult, but if you like learning a little bit, its good for you.

mgmax

Give this distro a try, it is specifically geared toward very old hardware. While it does have a live cd version the main goal is the ability to install and add software from floppies.


http://mulinux.sunsite.dk/mulinux.html

You could also try zipslack

http://www.slackware.com/zipslack/

the hardware req. for both is very, very low



peace V