Old laptop and LINUX

I have an old digital DEC hinote CT475

I have looked at the laptops and linux site and it is there but the info is for slackware 3.3 and we are up to 9 now so.

How can i load LINUX onto a laptop w/o a cd I do have LAN and 3.25 disks

What is the easiest and smallest distrobution I can load.

Thanks and sorry about the newbie questions

Do a web search yahoo/google etc. You'll find several possibilities that'll work on a low memory machine but you'll need at least 8mb on a 486.

go to Linux.org and browse the distributions. There are many "minimalist" distros out there that will boot off a floppy, and you can build up from there.

Thanks for the tips any specific distros that anyone recommends

Hi,

First, welcome to the world of CDROM-less laptops! You are
not alone. I've rencently been playing with all sorts of distros,
hoping to find the best overall setup for my Thinkpas 560.

SO, I found that the slackware floppies work the best. In
my case I have a PCMCIA-based network card, not sure
what you have for your "LAN" device.

In my case, from the slackware 9 release, I got 4 floppy images:

1) bare.i (bare boot)
2) install.1 (1st root)
3) install.2 (2nd root)
4) pcmcia.dsk (pcmcia drivers)

You may need a different #4, depending on your net device

That allowed me to be able to configure my network, and
access my FTP server, to grab various distros for experimentation.

You will need to know how to use the ifconfig command to
setup your eth0, let me know how you make out...

I'm currently installing PEANUT linux as I write this, which is
a little tricky, but not that bad. You have to get 2 files, and 2
floppy disk images, less than 400 MB total transfer, and the
"powerful" dist only consumes about 1.1G of space installed.

John

thanks for the info I may try that right now i am trying 2 disk to see how it works out the slacware one will be next if i dont suceed at this thanks again

ok so 2 disk was a bad idea need too much ram i have all the images above now what do i do. i have an network everywhere pcmcia card on a router with rogers high speed cable HELP!

i got permission denied when trying to rawrite bar.i whats up w/ that? i found a fix for this

now i got some kernel error saying not enough memory and no killable processes my drive is like 335 meg

for a not enough memory error, i did this and it worked
create a swap partition (type 82) of twice your ram then enter
mkswap/dev/hda1 ; swapon /dev/hda1
this uses the swap partition as ram
when you get to the menu asking to set up swap partitions, do nothing
go to the target partition (usually /dev/hda2 and partition it)
hope this helps

Hi,

rawrite is for windows!

assuming a 1.44MB floppy image use:

$ dd if=bar.i of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k

have your formatted floppy in the drive, but not "mounted"

if you need to format it, use:

$ fdformat /dev/fd0

if you are trying 1.722 MB floppy images, subsititue
/dev/fd0u1722 and bs=1722k

John

alright now I'm confused I am creating the floppy images on my windows box in a dos prompt (w2k) then moving them over to my laptop. I got the bare.i folder in and as soon a minute or so after i put the install.1 in i got kernel error not enough memory.

now that i have explained what happened can anyone walk me through this step by step I am a newbie after all

Just how much RAM are you working with? For 4MB or less, you may need to take special steps in order to install. It's possible to get a very minimal install in 2MB of RAM. Any less than that, I have not had experience with.

i have 8 meg of ram and i am looking for somethig to install on my hd with X i have 335 meg hd

Can you adapt something like the "2 disk linux"? How do I do that? TOMSRTBT seems to do fine on a 8MB system. I found it on Linux.org. On a 4MB system, (same machine before I got aholt of another stick) it would load about halfway then it said "Uh-Oh! Not enough RAM!"