I have recieved an old Toshiba Satelite 110CS from work and would like to put linux on it and see if i could get an internet connection, the only problem is that there is no cd drive only a floppy drive. Is something like this even possible or should I try to buy a cd drive or is it even worth it? I mainly just want to use it for gaim and possibly some websites or something, and if I could get wireless working that would be amazing.

If you can get dos to boot on it, and it can connect to the network now, you can do a network install. Just copy the contents of the cd's to a server (of sorts), and then copy the vmlinuz & initrd.img files from the isolinux directory of cd1 to the laptop. Then copy loadlin.exe to the system. Next, you will want to print out the isolinux.cfg file, or at least copy the first 3 lines starting with "label linux". On the laptop, boot to dos, then type "loadlin vmlinuz initrd=initrd.img acpi=ht vga=788 splash=silent" (or what ever the append line looks like for your distro). Follow the prompts to configure your network, and point it to your server for installation.

I won't kid you, it is difficult to get older laptops to install, especially without a cd drive. But it can be done. I have 3 old Pentium based HP Omnibooks, one of which now runs a minimal Mandriva 2006 image (the other two have hardware issues, and won't power up yet). I plan on turning them into digital picture frames as soon as I get them completely configured (as seen in Linux Toys by Extreme Tech).

I really do not know why loadlin would be necessary. Most linux distros come with floppy images you can use rawrite or dd to copy. I see you run SuSE, apparantly you have a lan. Go to one of your other computers and I think under the bootdisk directory on the cd, theres a bunch of README's telling you what you need to do to make a boot disk and driver disks. Copy the installation cd's to a directory on your lan, and tell suse's installation program to look for them there once you configured the network. You'll just have to acertain what kind of network it must be ftp, nfs, or what other options suse gives. That'd be my guess. If you go for a different distro go to there website to see how they do network installs... They all pretty much let you make boot floppies, can configure a network, and ask where to look for it...

Dave

It currently has windows 3.1 on it so getting to DOS is no problem, however all I have to connect it to the network is a Motorola WN825G wireless card, although I have no problem getting a wired card if it would make it significantly easier. It is possible to get DOS to detect a wireless connection?

Try google zipslack.

We once successfully installed Debian on an old Armada 7400 via
wi-fi without a CD drive back in '04 onto a new 40 Gig Hitachi. If I
recall correctly, we had to go back to the 'potato' release set of
diskette images to get a partition formatter that recognized the IDE
controller and the Avaya Wi-FI. So download the first image and boot
'er up, then it asks for the driver's images (about 3 diskettes) and away she goes!

http://www.debian.org/releases/potato/
but I don't know if they floppy images are still around.. maybe
sarge images will work for you..
Ed

Just searched my old posts and found some links that still point to
the 4 floppies you need, since you are not partitioning a new HD

http://people.debian.org/~joeyh/d-i/...floppy/access/

and from Oct 2005:
http://archive.progeny.com/debian/di...images/floppy/

good luck

EdW

And potato is still available
http://archive.debian.org/debian-arc...26-2001-06-14/

the README explains how to write the floppies from linux
or from MSDOS too!

Once (s)he boots up using the rescue.bin and root.bin floppies,
(s)he politely will ask you for the 4 driver diskettes, and then
will fire up your wi-fi.

Hi, i've come stumbling into here from a search before posting about it, i'm pretty glad there's already a topic here trying to install onto a 110CS.

I was given one by a dutch friend about 6months ago, at the moment it won't boot to windows. I don't know any other details as he didn't leave me with a power adapter for it, so once i've found one - ebay is my best bet - i want to try installing linux.

In the past i've succcessfully installed a few distros from CD and liveCDs, with and without gfx installers, but i was wondering how much harder it is to do on a pretty old laptop?

And from above am i right in thinking that these images can just be written to floppies from my XP machine, and used to boot/install onto the laptop?

except it seems there is an error building the boot flopppy 'disk full'
http://people.debian.org/~joeyh/d-i/...loppy_boot.log