Could someone please help me, and if you can't, could you please refer me to another forum in which to post this? (I'm somewhat confused.)

I'm trying to put Linux on my old IBM PS/1 from 1990. It has a 386 processor, I think, 80 megs of HD, and 2 megs of RAM. The floppy drive doesn't work, and I don't have one available, but I can take the hard drive out and pop it into another computer. I had ZipSlack on it, but upon booting it loaded the old OS/2 from ROM, I guess. I have no idea what to do. Which distro should I use, and what's the best way to slim it down to 80 megs? How can I get it to boot into Linux? How large should I make the swap file? Should I recomp the kernel to support whatever architecture it has, and how would I do that?

(Sorry, I'm a complete newbie.)
Thanks in advance,
Mike

Can you even run Linux with 2 mb RAM? Anyone?
I think there is a VERY-VERY light linux somewhere which fits on 2 floppies or something, but why would you even bother to do it in the first place?

Note that you have to be VERY good with linux to get something like what you have to run it in the first place.

try installing beOS. be works great on crappy old hardware.

hi -DICE, welcome to LQ here is a link that may shed some light on your situation

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...+on+an+old+386

good luck.

Thanks PEACEDOG, but most of those installations need to be done with floppies; mine isn't working for some reason.

And where can I get BeOS? (Sorry for the newb question.)

I think Mikhail_16 is correct in wondering if a Linux install is possible on 2 MB RAM.
Minix may work if you want a text based *nix like system.
Or...... DOS

'Linux requires very little memory to run compared to other advanced operating systems. You should have at the very least 2 MB of RAM; however, it's strongly suggested that you have 4 MB... Linux will run happily with only 4 MB of RAM, including all of the bells and whistles such as the X Window System, Emacs, and so on.'

--Running Linux, 2nd Edition (1996)

*lol* The times they have a-changed. So maybe try Slackware 3.5 or (possibly) something based on it like BasicLinux (though that may require 4). I've never run Linux on anything less than 8 MB, myself, but good luck!

And I have no idea how you could run BeOS on that - an open source BeOS wouldn't even support my S3 video and gave me a grayscale screen and was slow on 100MHz and 32 MB of RAM.

So, yeah - an older or specialist Linux distro or DOS or FreeDOS.

You can buy second hand floppy drives for almost nothing.

Oh, duh. Yeah, I got one for 5 bucks and probably got ripped off. *g* Same thing goes for RAM. Then again, PS/1s had funky hardware, iirc.

I don't think I can install anything via floppy with 2MB of RAM. Could I install one of these minimalist distros by popping my HD into another computer and copying files? If so, how?

TIA