AcerNote 350E (Very old)
 

This is the story: My dad was going to fix it so my uncle could go online. My uncle knows nothing about computers and all my dad was gonna do was buy a pcmcia network card and install it. But my dad managed too buy a new 3com card who has no win95 driveres. So I who have been bragging about linux for some time now said I could get it to work whit linux, inn over my head as usual :)

The biggest problem is this machine only has a floppy drive for transfer and only 8mb ram.

I am trying too install debian potato from floppy now, it has gone well so far even tho the documentasion says it needs 12mb ram. I made a 30mb swap partision just inn case, I can repartision it later.

The pcmcia port seems to be suported in the kernel (2.2.x)
The 3com card needs prism54

The install started whitout highmem so it's taking forever

My questions are general, I would like to know any and all opinions on how I can posible do this. What kernel version I should use? If there are distros better for this than debian? The important thing is to get the pcmcia to work with as few floppies as posible.

Any advice is very welcome.

Just to get somthing started (hopefully) here is what I'm thinking so far.

Once I have potato whit the 2.2.x kernel installed I will try to install the prism54 drivers. If that do not work (no hopes really) I will try to use the debian tools on this machine to make a custom kernel image whit the prism54 patch (kernel 2.4.x) and only the nessesary driveres and hopefully be able to transfer it useing floppies and installing it.

I'm hopeing someone have a better idea since I have no idea how to make a kernel image on one distro thats compatible whit an other and it do seem very complicated. I don't even know if a linux kernel has any recuirements (like more than 8mb ram).

Edit: And can someone plz give me any hints on how to enable highmem cuz this is insane...

Thanks for all the replys :cry: I would think colseing the bridge betwen 2 parts of hardwere that is separated by 10 years would be an intresting challenge, but guess not.
So I'll figguere it out by my self you.....
Got a new plan BTW, but since nobody cares

Anyway thx again for all the help :D

If you can't get debian to work, consider http://www.delilinux.de/#about or http://www.superant.com/smalllinux/ or look at these http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/inde..._Distributions . Hope that helps. I don't have much luck with very old computers, but I'm sure you can get it working if you try really hard.