I need a mini distro
I have a notebook 486 75MHz, 20mb ram, 1.5GB hdd, without CD
I want to put there LFS and i cannot use livecd because of missing cdrom.

Please tell me which mini distro i could use. On linux I'm not a newbie and also not a "noproblem" user, so I need a distro with (relatively) easy install.

Thank you.

u can try Damn Small Linux but wothout CD i cannot say how do u go about installing it

regards

yes,
i'm already downloading it (i searched and red a lot)

NBook is still on W98 on network so i can copy the .iso file or unpacked files to hdd but how do i boot it?

I have boot flopy from dsl but i couldnt find a how-to conf it to boot from hdd
I already instaled like thi w/o CD mandrake 10

I read about Catux USB. There are a few distros that can be run from a USB stick!

Does your notebook have a floppy drive? Maybe you could boot from there and get it to read the USB key

damn small also works with USB

He said it's a 486. I have never heard of a 486 with USB ports.

Hmm, overlooked that. What about a parallel port connection to another PC?

yes ,

using XDMCP chooser or LTSP(Linux terminal server)

that will be fine i think

regards

How about trying a mini-distribution that boots from dos and windows. There is Amigo (http://www.amigolinux.org/) if you have around 200 mb of diskspace and the network speed to download it. There is also minilin33 (http://amigolinux.org/download/others/minilin33.txt) that take around 17mb or mulinux (http://mulinux.sunsite.dk/), both of which have x-windows, take little space, and will boot from within windows 98.

so after 2 days of trying with DSL i will write you my experience

first:
486/75 MHz, 20MB RAM, 2GB HDD
no usb, no possibility for cd (so livecd is a 'no')
i have no problem to get any data to the disk, I can put it to another pc which is on network/internet (but also that has no cd )

first day i have been trying to start the DSL on notebook, so:
Nowhere is written how the boot works, and it was realy difficult to find it my self all.
Nowhere is writen anything about nocd/nousb boot. And if is, it covers only the copy part.

Like a stupid I was trying boots like: 'dsl vga=normal fromhd=/dev/hda5' 'dsl fromhd=/dev/hda6 ... 7' 'dsl fromhd=hda5'
(because acording to help i have to point to boot partition if it's not from cd)
also i found some 'romanian one diskete linux' (which is very good) for trying
This all could be ommited if some where on the main page of DSL was written:

'When booting DSL without CDROM from HDD, the CD files must be copyed directly to the root of FAT or FAT32 drive. (Ext2 file format is not supported.) The file 'knoppix' and the directory 'knoppix' have to be lowercase.
After booting from diskete when "dsl:" shows up, just press [ENTER], the boot loader automaticaly searches all devices for copyed cd image and /knoppix/knoppix file.'


In this short text is all my painfull experience with DSL.

No not all:
hd-install sucks grately, or more exactly, the mkliloboot. I had to edit it that it finds the files it needs.
and after that it has rewriten MBR, I rebooted it but instead of DSL from HDD i've got many lines of 01 01 01 01 ...

so i downloaded lilo-22.6.1.src.tar.gz and another suprise, dsl couldnt compile it.

So for me the DSL has no value. It's maybe good as a live cd but unsutable for hdd



i will try some micro distros from Radiomaan (thank you)

but if someone knows:
I don't need a win/dos working linux but a one which i can install on ext2 with lilo, in which i can compile, and i don't need X, just text mode. X is too heavy for my ram.

Thank you for any answer.

Jay

hi there
why don't u install then any distro woth minimal install
say for example redhat 9.0 with no X
make a bootup floppy then bootup and get instrallation files

from a different machine through ftp or http or NFS
this is possible i have done this,but i forget again that u have only 20 MB Ram

in that case i think the LTSP or XDMCP should be fine for u

regards

I thank everybody who participated to help me...

Finaly, I tryed zipslack and it's exactly what i needed, my notebook runs...

So thanks to all, it's good to know that still are people who help others...

I used to have a laptop which was a beige compaq lte5000 (pentium classic, 75mhz, 24mb ram, 800mb hdd, cdrom/floppy not hot swappable....). runs crap even in windows 95...

Initially i used mandrake 7.2 on it (which ran pretty well on IceWM with about 300mb free space) then Slackware 9.1 / 10.0 (minimum install)
(with TinyX and Xfce)

Since then i chucked away that laptop in favour of my IBM Thinkpad T22 which now runs gentoo