Very old Panasonic laptop

LittleAngel · 06-20-2004, 09:46 AM

I've just been given a very old Panasonic CF-1000 series laptop, which runs Windows 3.1.
It only has a floppy drive, and I would like to install a compact Linux version on it with a simple, but effective desktop, basically something like Damn Small Linux.

How would I be able to create bootable floppies from the ISO image to install any Linux distro via floppy drive?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

esteeven · 06-20-2004, 11:34 AM

have you got a network card with it? ....if so, you could try the Debian floopy boot with network install.

LittleAngel · 06-20-2004, 11:52 AM

Hi and many thanks for replying.

No, unfortunately it doesn't have a network card, since it runs Windoze 3.1 (not a networkable system).

The question would also be whether there still is any network card that would work with this extremely old laptop - it really looks like the laptop version of a trabby!

I'm also unable to find out any specs for this machine on the web - sorry, no

to read up on!

kauggie · 06-20-2004, 02:36 PM

Does it have a pcmcia connector? If yes, then you could plug in a pcmcia hdd and "install from partition" or a pcmcia network adapter and install from network...

Also I am sure that it has a Serial (RS232) port... somewhere I read that you can install lin from there also (tough lot of time...)

Note also that you'll need a special kernel, with support for old processors.

jcookeman · 06-20-2004, 08:30 PM

Why not look into zipslack?

http://www.slackware.com/zipslack/

Although, it looks like muLinux might be the best start.

http://mulinux.nevalabs.org/

You can look into some of the older Slackware distributions as they still have the complete floppy based install.

LittleAngel · 06-21-2004, 05:35 PM

Thanks very much to all of you!

Mu Linux looks promising, it also has a link to the following page
ftp://ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de/pub/linux/mulinux/tiny.html

A collection of mini/micro/mu Linuxes - isn't that smart!

Will do some research on all of these and some

But this has really helped me.

And yes, as kauggie mentioned, I'll need an older kernel to go with the older processor.

Thank you all!!!