Here is what I have to install DSL (or any Linux Distro)

IBM Thinkpad 560x (233p2 1USB port)
96mb RAM
4gb HDD
Belkin F5D7050 v3001 Wireless USB
PCMCIA Panasonic 4x KXL-D740
Buslink UII-RW52e USB CDRW
NO Current OS ATM

I have tried Slackware 9-11 floppy boot disks to no avail on detecting or manually selecting USB or PCMCIA source. Also tried Debian flavours of floppy boot again to be stalled by a brick wall. Keep in mind that I am new to linux, however I have successfully set up a Linux File server via slackware for a 50 PC network (access to that system is not available)

Basically I can boot from Floppy or HDD, the TP560x has the ability to boot via PCMCIA but not with the KXL-D740. I had Windows 98se running fine with all accessories running in good order. Including teh Wireless USB. I do have access to a PCMCIA 10/100 wired network card, but no other Linux box at the current location, I also have access to a 2 port USB2.0 CardBus Type II hub.

At my current location I have access to a new laptop, and 2 newer PC's running Windows XP home/Pro. Wired and Wireless Network.

I could reinstall Windows98/2k but would rather keep the 560x as a linux Client mainly for Email/Web Browsing/Learning... so any help would be appreciated.. As we speak I am messing with various Parameters to pass on teh 3 avail floppy boot images... any and all help is appreciated.. thanks in advance

-Jef

Just to make sure I understand your situation, 1) you can boot from floppy, 2) you have a PCMCIA CD-drive, and you want to install DSL?

The last time I was on a DSL dowload site, I believe I saw a floppy image with PCMCIA in its name. I haven't tried this, but my guess is if you put a DSL CD in the PCMCIA drive, and boot from a floppy with that image on it you could get DSL running. DSL then provides you with menu options for doing either a frugal install or a regular install. You might want to read up on those before proceeding.

I don't know if you have ever put an image onto a floppy before. This is not the same as just copying the file over. If you have another Linux system running, you can create the floppy with the dd command. If you have to do it from a MS machine, there is a program to do this called rawrite.exe which you can download from various places on the internet. I believe rawrite.exe also comes with some of the Linux distros for the purpose of creating a floppy to boot the installation CD.

I am aware of how to make an image I did download all 3 bootfloppies (USB, PCMCIA and Regular) and the PCMCIA on different formatted disks and from different mirroes sends a Could not load NTDLR on boot.. the USB and Regular bootfloppies will load to linux installer, but obviously not find the USB CDROm nor the PCMCIA drive.

Sorry about that! Somehow in trying to figure out your discussion of the different distros, I didn't grasp the meaning of the last sentence in you first post.

My experience of booting from a floppy is from an older version of DSL, but when it couldn't find a KNOPPIX (the actual name of the huge file it needs from the CD, even though this is DSL) file it would tell you it was dropping you into a very minimal shell and leave you at a command prompt.

You've got me curious now. I am going to download that PCMCIA disk and play with it. But I probably won't be posting back until much later today or tomorrow ... assuming I come up with anything.

P.S. I couldn't make head or tails out of that error message. Even after googling.

Well I broke down and got a 512mb USB Stick and it installed flawlessly using the bootdick-usb.img with a pass of fb800x600 resolution (560x video chipset doesnt support 1024x760 or larger)

However now I am trying to figure out how to get the Belkin F5D7050 v3001 configured lol

Wireless??? I am afraid I can't help you there.

But I think I did figure out how to boot from PCMCIA CD-drive, for your reference or anybody else who stumbles across this thread and is interested. Unless, of course, you tell me you tried this and it didn't work. I don't have a PCMCIA CD-drive, so I could only watch the boot process start.

You need to boot from the regular boot floppy, but at the boot prompt pass it the parameter frompcmcia

So I typed:

dsl frompcmcia

(presumably you would have needed fb800x600 frompcmcia). It loaded the kernel and inird and then prompted for the pcmcia floppy.

It then printed:

Loading PCMCIA modules
Starting cardmgr

At this point it presumably would find and start the CD-drive, and then go looking for the KNOPPIX file. Which of course, in my test, it couldn't find, and it dumped me into the very minimal shell.

I tried that and it did reconize my Type I and Type II slots, however It wouldnt activate or find the CD Drive..

I do have DSL 3.1 Installed and running, and I am certainly happier with DSL vs Slack or Mandrake as the platform seems perfect for a HDD instalation for this type of laptop with the lack of resources even in slightly newer machines.

As for the USB Wireless Adapter, i will start another thread to get better exposure for it.

On a side note (and may need to make a new thred for this) assuming this is the right forum.. is it possible to upgrade DSL 2.4 to a 2.6 Kernel or to DSL-N?

Appreciate your help.

Interesting ... (You probably had other words for it. ) I wonder if maybe it just can't deal with your particular hardware (CD drive). When I was looking through the PCMCIA floppy I noticed a lengthy file listing hardware types (don't remember the name of the file). Just for my own satisfaction, when I get a little time I'll check to see if your hardware is listed there.

Now onto something you are probably more interested in ...

The DSL project has stated they don't ever plan on using the 2.6 kernel, both because it is larger (and they have a hard, self imposed, 50 MB cap), and because it doesn't have as good of support for old hardware. I doubt if there is a sane way to "upgrade" from DSL to DSL-N. I would suggest you copy the DSL-N "KNOPPIX" file, kernel, and initrd to you DSL partition and modify LILO to dual boot into either your existing DSL installation or into DSL-N. Since you now have an OS running on your system, the copying should be painless, I hope. (BTW, can you access your PCMCIA CD drive from the installed DSL?)

In this case, DSL-N would be running essentially the same way as if it were a live CD, but everything will instead be on your HD. This will run a little slower than a regular install but faster than it would from a CD. If you're happy with it, you could juggle things to give yourself a persistent home directory, or you could decide to replace your DSL installation with DSL-N.

You may be aware that DSL-N uses the 2.6 kernel. The last I checked they were still doing release candidates for 0.1. But since they are an offshoot of DSL, it is much more mature than you would normally expect for a 0.1 release. There are some significant differences, including things I didn't like (like an almost unusable vi editor because it is running from busybox).

If you decide to set things up this way, the easiest thing to do is to create a directory called KNOPPIX (in caps) in the root directory of any partition -- your DSL partition should work fine. Then copy the KNOPPIX file into that directory, just like the CD is structured. When DSL-N starts booting, it will check all partitions for that KNOPPIX file (this is if you did a regular install of DSL; if you did a frugal install, you might have to rename something to avoid a conflict.). You will have to tell it where the DSL-N kernel and initrd are in your /etc/lilo.conf file, and run lilo from with DSL. If this is too brief of a description, I can flesh it out for you. I currently have DSL-N set up this way on a multiboot system.

That would probally work.. mainly what I need is the gcc2.95+ kernel source to get the wireless adapter to work.. and I think the lib files for the current kernel resource..

There are native drivers and ndsiwrapper compatable drivers that will work with iwconfig however w/o the ability to compile with gcc make and the source it makes it hard...

So I do not know if changing to DSL-N is going to solve any of that as I dont belive it is packed with gcc nor src files..

DSL has the src and gcc 2.2(too old) in MyDSL but I dont think its the full source and

Ok the chipset manuf. has the native drivers available.. their instructions are...

I assume I can get via local MyDSL these files to get this to compile under DSL3.1 ...

gcc1-with-libs.dsl
linux-kernel-headers.dsl
kernelsource.dsl

If that works (not sure if those are what I need or not) then I se eno reason to mess with an already perfect OS

Makes sense to me, but I have never compiled anything on DSL. I don't know if you would also need libc6-dev.dsl or possibly even libc6.dsl. (I don't even know why the libc6.dsl is in myDSL -- I would think that would be part of the standard install.)

Well still sitting here frustrated lol..

What I need.. dont really care about anything else lol..

RT73 Legacy Drivers to be installed
Wifi Search/Display for access points (I travel and dont always know the ssid)
Firefox with flash 9 support

This is all doable with some playing in DSL and DSL-N however I do not know exactly what I woudl need... or even if a slightly larger LiveCD linux such as Slax would be any different.. Seems to be problems with compiling as not ALL of the 2.4.x source is included in the kernalsource.dsl/header/dsl files

I could just put 98se back on but I really hate Microcrap with a passion and so far DSL has totally outperformed 98se

I have had the wireless card working for about 5 minutes with ndiswrapper injection but its extremely unstable and doesnt auto load from boot.

If I was to try and duel boot DSL-n or Slax what would I put in the grub.conf? (never could get lilo to load on a non frugal install even if selected it installs grub)

I have no experience with Slax ...

The full kernel source code from kernel.org is about 200 MB IIRC. So I thought the something like 3 MB from myDSL sounded rather small. I suppose you could find out whether that really contains everything that went into the DSL kernel by purchasing the CD that contains all of the source. (Beware: when I have ordered the actuall live CDs from them, both times it took about a month to get it.) You're probably aware that the myDSL "info" file for those packages stated that they were for compiling drivers ... I dunno.

I have no experience with ndiswrapper, but if you want it to automatically load at boot, you can put the command(s) in /opt/bootlocal.sh.

Again, I have no experience with Slax. I mentioned lilo in my earlier post because when I did a regular install of DSL 1.0 for somebody else, lilo was what DSL used. I guess it has changed. And lilo is what I use on the multi-boot system I have DSL-N on. But I think I can translate it to GRUB for you.

Double check and make sure there isn't already a /KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX file on your drive. If not, that is where you should put the KNOPPIX image from DSL-N. (If there is a conflict, you can rename DSL-N's KNOPPIX file and and add knoppix_name=<modified name> on the kernel line of grub.conf.) For reference, I did this with DSL-N 0.1RC3, but things probably haven't changed. You can find the kernel (called linux) and the initrd (called minirt.gz) in DSL-N's CD image's /isolinux directory. I copied these to the /KNOPPIX directory, but you could put them where you want, and adjust the following.

Then I believe the correct grub.conf entry would be (assuming your root partition is /dev/hda1):

You can of, of course, add to or modify the parameters on the kernel line. Just so you know, I pulled those parameters from the /isolinux/isolinux.cfg file on the DSL-N CD image, using what is provided when you specify fb800x600, since this is what you said worked for DSL.