Old laptop, small linux
 

Hi!,

I got an old HP omnibook, i dont know the model number as its worn off.

It used to run win95 on a PCMCIA hard drive... but the hard drive no longer works.

It has got a normal floppy drive and also has a PCMCIA network card (3com 3CXE589EC) but no CD-Rom.

What i am trying to find is a small floppy distro that offers ssh access and supports that laptop hardware (network mainly) i have looked at a few of them the main one that supported everything was Tomsrtbt but i couldnt find SSH or install SSH, so i really need one that has ssh built in or very easy to install...

The other thing i was thinking about was a network OS ? somehow use a boot floppy to boot off of a network ? but i havnt a clue on what i need to install or have for that to work?

Thanks in advance to any replys!
Grant.

:study:

while..icewalkers provide some cool distros..however, some of them may need cd-rom to boot up which doesn't work for you..

Ice Walkers Mini Distros

Hi again,

I had a look through that site quite alot of good distro's... i found a few there that might work... but i also found a few netboot distro's but most dont support the network card i want to use :cry:

I think maybe its going to be best to try and get myself a second hand PCMCIA hard drive for it, i just hope linux picks that up :)

I will still give a few of the ones i found a try and tell you how i went...

Thanks again
Grant.

orby99; have u attempted to look at lqo,s howto. http://tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX and HOWTO/Hardware-HOWTO/index sections on PCMCIA,s that may help.

Hi,

I had a look at some of the howto's...

But i think its best for me to try and find something that has it allready built in as adding support dont seem like something i am happy with trying...

I tried some other floppy distro's but none as yet support what i need.

I had another idea though, couldnt i just use a serial cable plugged into the laptop and my main pc and then boot one of the distro's that dont have network support and just use the serial cable to my main pc for ssh... as thats all i am trying to get SSH access over PCMCIA network.... i dont need anything else really as i could just use my main pc's resources for other things.

Any ideas how i would go about doing that ? and if its a good or bad idea ?

Thanks again :)
Grant.