[SOLVED] Wanting to put Linux on an old Toshiba Tecra 700CT/1200

This might be a rather tall order. I have an old Toshiba Tecra 700CT/1200 laptop that has an old and corrupted Windows 98 on it. The hard drive appears to be either 1.2 GB or 2.1 GB, I am not exactly sure yet. The hard drive is a Fujitsu MHA2021AT. The processor is a Pentium 1 120 MHz and it has 48 MB of ram. It has a 3.5 floppy drive that is exchangable with a cdrom drive and has the ability to use an external floppy drive. I do not have either the cdrom drive or the external floppy drive. Just the swappable floppy drive. I am wanting to see if I can put some type of a Linux distro on it that either uses 2.4 or the 2.6 kernel with 2.6 being the preferred kernal. I also want to backup the contents of the hard drive to an image file first before doing this. At the moment I don't have any way to run this hard drive on another PC at the moment. I do have a pcmcia Ethernet card made by SVEC model PE-200. What I am hoping to do is find a Linux distro that has a boot floppy that has networing and pcmcia support built in and has at the least the dd command on it. I am hoping that I can do both the backup and install over the network. Is this actually possible to do?

In wikipedia is a list of tiny distros, but I couldn't recommend you one since I have not used any of them but puppy, I think there are very minimalistic versions, of tiny core, slitaz, damn small linux, ttylinux, I wonder if you could run NIX on it it would be awesome!

But let me assure you IT is possible to install linux on that, I would not use any GUI, but there are very good ways of learning how to be productive in a CLI only enviroment.

If you are new to this I would suggest you to try NIX even if its not in that computer, just so you know what Im talking about, its a small download, either try it burned to cd, or in virtualbox, since it doesn't seem to work on modern usb-live media creators.

Originally Posted by ismaelvc I would not use any GUI, but there are very good ways of learning how to be productive in a CLI only enviroment.

I would use a GUI on this. Obviously GNOME AND KDE are out of the question. I am thinking more in the line of fvwm95 and fvwm98, Equinox (EDE), Small Window Manager (swm), XD640, one of the tiling managers, or even no desktop or window manager at all (and yes you can do that in X and Xfree86 although it is not the best way to go). Not sure if Xfce or LXDE would work though. Another thing that would help would be to use the old Tiny X server to conserve resources.

Originally Posted by ismaelvc If you are new to this I would suggest you to try NIX even if its not in that computer, just so you know what Im talking about, its a small download, either try it burned to cd, or in virtualbox, since it doesn't seem to work on modern usb-live media creators.

I'm not exactly new to Linux as I first was using it back in 1996 during the 2.0.30 kernel days. I've only used it lightly over the years as I was waiting for it to mature a bit before I could rely in it primarily. I know all of the old unixes would run on this with no problem such as minix as would the very old Slackware Linuxes. But that stuff is not supported anymore and those Linuxes before the 2.4 kernels are not as good as the kernels of the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. I remember the pcmcia support in those days were iffy at best. So I am looking for something from today that would allow me the back up the drive and get Linux on it with only a floppy and an ethernet connection.

A 2.6 kernel will not fit on a floppy disk anymore, so you should try it with a 2.4 kernel first. The oldest still supported Slackware version is 8.1 from 2002. You may be able to run a GUI on it (no, LXDE or XFCE in current versions will not work), but you won't have fun with it. Salix 13.37 with only Openbox and xterm running will fill up those 48MB almost completely, this should be better if you use an 2.4 kernel and optimize it for size, but even then it wouldn't be fun to use that machine.
For machines with less than 64MB I would recommend to run a CLI only system.

I got

http://sourceforge.net/projects/blueflops/

to work on a P66 hz 12MB ram no name door stop netbook that is older than your Tecra. It boots off of a floppy drive. I don't have a 16 bit pcmcia ethernet card for it though so it does not go online. I have a 16 bit pcmcia telephone modem. But no dial up service either. So it is a door stop for now. It comes with a 2.6 kernel and pcmcia support, I am not sure if dd is included though, You might have to search for that info or just try the floppies and see.

http://www.lampdocs.com/blueflops-2-0-15/

Just some more interesting info for you below

http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=02859

Edit: Pictures of my netbook

http://tinypic.com/useralbum.php?ua=...1Bbb5mUQ%3D%3D
.

I might be tempted to try a network install from www.netboot.me

You can get a g4u disk to copy some distro that you saved off to a raw file if you want.

There are some older versions of linux that have boot floppies still and I think there is a wake pup or even try a plop if you want to boot off a usb.

Qnx floppy might work on it.

Blueflops sounds very interesting. I didn't realize UPX was available for Linux. I knew about the dos and Windows versions for those exe files. Looks like it uses the same libs as DSL. That will be something worth looking into. I'll also keep netboot in minds as well as last ditch effort. Thanks for the replies everyone.

Edit:

Well I tried Blueflop and I was not able to get the ethernet card to work. DD is available though. I plugged the card into my Dell Latitude D400 and booted up Slackware and it was detected as an NE2000 compatible card and the pcnet_cs driver was loaded and it was assigned device descriptor eth1 and was using port address 0X300 irq 3. I am able to query the card and it is identified as PMX-PE-200 ETHERNET R01. So it appears to work under Slackware but not under Blueflop. Ideas anyone?

I decided to abandon Blueflop and go with Slackware 11.0 as it is the last Slackware release to support floppy installs. I figure that Slackware will be able to do what I am wanting to do in Linux on this machine. I was able to backup the W98 partition and it's mbr using some tools I had on some old floppies that are stored in a box. I then used the Slackware install disks with the PCMCIA supplemental disk. I decided to just do the install from a 2 GB cf card in the PCMCIA slot. I ran into some problems during the install attemp. The floopy drive was showing some signs that it is about to give out. I have another slightly older laptop, TI Extensa 575CD. I discovered that the Extensa uses the same floppy drives as the Tecra, so I did a temporary exchange. Changed caddies on the floppy drive and installed it in the Tecra. The next problem I had during the next install attempt was segmentation faults. I figured that the cf card could not be the cause of the segmentation faults and decided that the memory could be bad. So I got the latest version of Memtest86+ on a floppy image, put it on a floppy, and booted up the Tecra with it. Memtest showed that the memory module on the Tecra is bad. Now I know why Win98 was crashing and getting corrupted. This laptop is an old laptop of one of my brothers, who does not even use it anymore. Heck, he's not even in the same state anymore either. Well the Tecra is going to be a doorstop for a while longer as I don't have the money to get a replacement memory module for it. I decided to put the Tecra's hard drive in my Extensa and at use Linux on that (also restored it's floppy drive). I figure the Extensa has the same capabilities as the Tecra with only a Slower Pentium 1 processor (100 MHz). I was able to get Slackware installed using the same floppy install method as on the Tecra. I've used about half of the drives storage. I've now come across another problem with the Slackware setup script. The configuration won't work. I'll make a new thread in the Slackware part of this forum.