The CD-ROM is my sister's and it's old and it's only got 20 RAM. The only real value it has is that it's a laptop. I'd like to install a console only version of Linux on it. Since it doesn't have a CD-ROM I'm wondering how can I install Linux on it? I have another computer and I was thinking about running it from Parallel port to port. Will this be able to access Linux? Any help on how you'd do it?

I don't know about parallel port to install linux but certainly I have installed on CDROM less computers. I used an NFS linux box as the source and accessed it using a PCMCIA network card in the laptop. I have though had problems with the later RH distros on computers with less than 32MB of ram. The installer crashes even in text mode. One of the other distros may be better at this.

Paul

Serial and parralel are do-able, but dog slow, if you have any way of doing a network install: Debian, RedHat, SuSe, ggaaaaah, even a Gentoo install (but the compile time would be weeks), any of the BSDs.

Offhand, Debian is probably the best bet, the base system install is easy (and small, 250MB land) and the kernel is old enough so as to allow for some of the elder pcmcia bridges that have been left and forgotten by 2.4.x's yenta_socket driver.

What kind of drive size are you talking about, I used to play with a series of 4 P133Mhz 24Mb RAM laptops, mostly installed Slack and Debian, but I had 1 with a working cdrom.

Cheers,

Finegan

i am also looking to install linux on an older laptop - mine is p66 processor w/ 40MB of RAM and an 850MB hard disk. i have a CDROM for mine, but run into the same lack of resource fails when i try to install any of the current RH, Suse, Mandrake, or Gentoo distros...
is there an older release version that i should look into for one of the distros? i want to be able to do browsing/email/text editing in graphical mode. until i find an answwer it's stuck with $IN95
THANKS!!!!

my big box is already on Mandrake, dual-booting Gentoo.