Hi Forum - Minimal Distro Fan Here

Finally got around to posting an intro here after a year or so of visiting these forums randomly. I'm a fan of minidistros - my favorites being BasicLinux 3.5 and Damn Small Linux v3.3. (For what it's worth, I'm also a FreeDOS fan, and am working on my own DOS distro as well. This will include a linux driven by loadlin.exe from WITHIN the DOS, and this will either be BasicLinux or Pygmy. I'm leaning toward BasicLinux, since the footprint for BL has been optimized already for old machines...but we'll see.

Cheers,

-Martin.

Sounds like you got the hang of it. Howdy and Welcome.

Thank-you. Pygmy is not cooperating on the setup (loadlin init options not working...kernel panic, etc), so BasLin it will be! What a great little distro! To test compatibility, I'm using a 486dx2 thing that I rescued from the trash. Someone left it outside my apartment building by the curb, complete with a working Samtron 76V SVGA monitor. Anyway, the Creative 4x CD-ROM drive is proprietary Panasonic/Matsushita, and connects to a SB card instead of the main board. Attempts to connect a working CD-ROM drive to IDE bus results in freezing at boot. Therefore, the 5¼" & 3½" drives were the only media I/O's available to me on the machine. The result has been great fun - rescuing all my old diskettes crammed with games and editors from my years in the '80's at the University of New Brunswick. Some of these programs were developed by fellow students who now likely have little or no interest on them, but I'd like to reach the authors first to find out for sure if they would care if I included them.