hey all,

i'm in quite the same situation as whohlme and i wonder how you guys (especially harmattan) got slackware 10.2 installed on such old machines. i know the requirements are not the problem but with no cd-rom, no connection to the inet and just a floppy drive; how the hell did you get linux on such a machine?

i have an IBM ThinkPad 760LD (90MHz Pentium, 40MB RAM) and i'm busy trying to do this. as far as i know there are no floppy installations for DSL, slackware & co. For DSL you would need about 50 floppy disks to get all the stuff copied for slackware way more...

btw, whohlme: i had problems with my hdd as well til i found out it was scsi and not ide. maybe your hd detection fails cause it's scsi and not ide. try loading the scsi drivers.

vadkutya

Thanks, I'll try that but i think it's IDE because in the BIOS, which i have to view every time it boots because of a cmos error, the hdd options are Enhanced IDE or regular ide. It may work though, so i'll try that right now and see how it goes.

I thought Slackware had documentation about how to install it onto old/very low hardware, probably using diskettes etc..not sure if it was in Slackbook itself, but somewhere - so head to the site and see. In any case I'd start off with Slackware, because it can be made run on old hardware, you'll learn with it if you try to avoid the "too easy solutions", there are good documents available on how to work with it and so on.

I wouldn't try running X on it at first; if you get a system installed with command line, then you may try, but don't expect too much.

I tried to load the SCSI drivers on the Debian net install, but it was a no -go. the thing kept exiting so I think i'll go with another distro. I've got lots of foundation learning to do so I may pick this up later.

hey b0uncer,

there is a documentation on how to install slackware on old hardware but it still requires getting the packages loaded on the machine via cd-rom drive, premounted partition or netinstall. the rootdisks are intended for old hardware which is not capable of booting from cd-rom drive. since i have no cd-rom and no network connection i was wondering if there might be a possibility to install linux via floppy. but maybe this is only true for linux-1.0 or so ...dunno.

whohlme: how do you connect to the inet? not with a modem, i suppose. do you have a pcmcia card with network interface or does your old laptop already have such an interface build in? i think i have a low level version of the ibm thinkpad 760ld 'cause mine does not have a network interface wether modem or lan.

anyway, will try to get either an old pcmcia card for netinstall or scsi controller for my desktop to install linux on it. a good choice is slackware 10.2 since the requirements are quite low (486, 8mb RAM...i think) yet it is not outdated.

good luck, vadkutya