Hi everyone,

i new to this forum,

i got a problem. I mainly use my laptop for usual business things, no gaming or so. i thought about installing linux cause my machine is not the newest anymore and hopefully push the speed a lite bit. I mainly use office & acrobat & firefox and photoshop. but my main problem is:

my cd-rom is broken, i only got a floppy drive and a wlan card (netgear MA401). i was told that it should be possible to install debian net install and that is should be quite good for my old system, as huge installs would be as slow as windows.

my tech specs:

PIII 433MHZ, 128MB RAM, S3 GPU (8MB), 4GB HDD

So does anybody know if there is possibilty to install linux via wlan. or is there maybe a better distro for my system. it should have a gui and not to hard to handle since im not really a experienced linux user.

thanks

eule

do you have usb ports? If so you could try using a thumbdrive distro.

I have one usb 1.1 but it is not able to boot from usb. and btw i dont have a usb flashdrive and dont really wanna buy if i dont know if it works.

I have downloaded base-files, rescue.bin drivers.bin etc. i also get in the install setup using loadlin, but i dont know how to make the wlan module run for installation.

isnt there a possibilty of installing the cd-image from hdd? this cant be impossible. must say that i only got 2GB of free space since i still wanna keep my windows partition, cause this is all still experimental.

hope somebody got a idea :-)

I have a similar situation myself, and could use a hand. Here's what I have so far:

Fujitsu stylistic LT tablet pc, with 1 usb port, 1 internal HD, and 1 external floppy. The floppy is recognized at boot, but my only two choices to boot from are floppy or hard drive. I created a regular windows 98 floppy with help from www.bootdisk.com and added a few modifications, I added device=usbaspi.sys to my config.sys and downloaded usbaspi.sys from here

I grabbed an old thumb drive, 128mb that I had laying around and downloaded the gentoo minimal live cd, and loadlin onto it, put the floppy and the usb drive in the tablet and powered on. Dos boot's fantastically, recognizes the usb drive, and I'm in buisness. I cd to the directory where the kernel image resides on the thumb drive...

loadlin gentoo root=/dev/hda3 ro initrd=gentoo.igz

works good all the way until init is supposed to spawn, then I get:
Warning: unable to open an initial console.
Kernel panic - not syncing: No inti found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

Any ideas? A few lines before this I see:
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.

The hard drive inside has been partitioned/formatted using a plain old linux rescue floppy with fdisk and mke2fs such that /dev/hda1 is a 32mb boot partition (bootable) formatted to ext2, /dev/hda2 is a 128mb swap, initilized with mkswap and /dev/hda3 is the remainder of the drive in ext3 format.

spent a few days working on this project, I'm running out of ideas.

Cant i just download the cd image and install it from hdd? in the debian setup an install option is filesystem. why would that option be available if you cant use it???

Just an idea