Hi,

I got an pc with these specs:
* P120
* 64Mb ram
* 512Mb hard drive
* working floppy drive
* cdrom/dvd (bios does not support boot from cd)
* no mouse (serial ports only)
* no usb or network cards
* Mach64 pci based videocard
* pci soundcard (soundblaster 16)

I plan to use this as an isolated machine for text based operations like:
* runnnig and compiling c, c++ programs
* inform text adventures
* play the odd .mod (via mikmod for example).
* As many dos based tools as possible (that a measly 500Mb would fit)

Probable partitions
/swap 50-100Mb)
/ (200Mb)
/home (200Mb)


I have been looking at few distros like suse 10.2 and xbuntu 7.10 (text based install and minimum options) and DSL. But my problem is getting a distro that will let me create a linux boot disk from the dos prompt on this old machine. I have the xbuntu 7.10 cd iso burnt - but its useless since I can't boot from it and don't have any prepared linux boot disk.
Can anyone offer any ideas what I can do or if there is a distro that comes ready with the dos tools to create an boot disk? It would be nice to get the machine going for something. Thanks.

Most distros include rawrite.exe or similar. Open the cd in Windows explorer and have a look at the directories. There are also usually help files which assist with creating a boot disk.

Found something specific here
. I'll try the freedos route and see if that works around the problem.

Could do a search for your distro of choice and bootfloppy.. .

Debian for instance has Floppy images available to do a Network install of Debian on a system using only floppies..
http://www.debian.org/distrib/floppyinst

Thanks farslayer - I'll check it out this weekend. As I said it doesn't have network access at all. A limited pc with a basic command line linux flavour I guess. Maybe something like Knoppix or Peanuts. I'll check it out this weekend anyhow.

I missed th eno network line..

Maybe some of these floppy based distros are still good..
http://users.sunet.com.au/~tsn/floppy_linux.html