Hi,
I'd really appreaciate it if someone help me. I am not very experienced with Linux so you guys will need to take things easy w/ me.

I have an old dell laptop (p133 24 mb ram) that I reformatted as of and 2 hours ago. So now, for the past two hours I have been strugling, trying to find a way to install Linux on it.
I have a backpack cd writer connected to it via parallel port, but that has no use since it requires drivers. I also have a PCMA (or whatever they are called) card that can connect to one of the cd roms that I have at a friends house. And I also have a internal floppy drive on the machine. Along with all of this I have a 7.3 full installation set straight from SuSE(yast2,etc.)

My dad has a p3 500 mhz computer running suse 7.3 but the floppy drive does not work, so I doubt I can make a boot floppy from there (not that I know how to).

So what can I do at this point? When I start up the computer I am able to get into dos via a dos bootup disk.
Could one of you kind people please give me the file to be able to start up a suse linux installation?

Thanks in advance!

Haven't tinkered with SuSE in a while,
but I remember that there's floppy-images
for support of PCMCIA based CD-Roms.

I suggest looking through the CD's directories
and trying to find the boot-/rootdisks, and
build them on your notebook (rawrite also
comes on the SuSE CD's).

Cheers,
Tink

I have no idea how to work rawrite...its very weird, plus I have win xp which has no support for dos.

there should be a rawrite program for windows on there as well

Believe it or not we are in the same boat currently. Look for the rawritexp.exe in the directory where rawrite.exe is living. It should be there, if not, look for rawritent.exe

These are for XP and NT respectively, they should both be on the disc.

I'm having a helluva time because my floppy and CDROM both go in the same bay, and I cannot use them at the same time; in order to swap I have to shutdown so a floppy boot doesn't work, well, I'm working around it as we speak, but just thought I'd throw it out there for support for ya

Cool

And after re-reading your post I am even MORE in the same boat as you. I've got 2 other computers, floppies all dead, so no chance of creating boot floppies in them. The difference is I've got a working (yeah, right ) 98SE install that I am using to create all my boot floppies on the laptop with (btw, my laptop is a Canon INNOVA book 475CDS: P 100mhz, 32MB RAM, and that's about it... I spent 30 bux today on a NIC for the bad boy which is 10 dollars more than I paid yesterday for the entire laptop WITH 56K modem! What a deal... ).

Wow I can sure ramble sometimes eh?

Anyway, here's what I am doing if this helps at all:
www.slackware.com/getslack
I'm using the slackware-current rawrite and the bootdisk bare.i and the rootdisk install.1 install.2 and pcmcia.dsk (required for lappy's). Rawrite basically will prompt you for the images, point it to them, hit enter, point it to your floppy drive (with a floppy in it) hit enter, swap floppies for each image.

From there, boot up with the "bare.i" floppy, when prompted insert the next disc which is install.1 Then install.2 and finally pcmcia. At the prompt when you are finally greeted and login as root, immediately after that (before you type setup or ANYTHING) type pcmcia and hit enter. I'm not there quite yet, but those are what I've dug up so far. At that point I plan on using the (hopefully) working NIC connection to install Gentoo (shh don't tell slack, but I just wanna see what compile time is like on something like this).



Cool

MasterC, the floppy drive on the lapton, DOES in fact work. It just that another computer (which has suse and could probably create a boot disk) has a broken floppy which means I need someone on here to give me that data that would come with the floppy.

Yeah, that's what that link is If you can get on the net with that box somehow, go to your preferred distros website (sounds like SuSE right?) and grab em, OR they actuall SHOULD be on the CD's in a bootdisk/rootdisk directory.

Cool

Here's the info for SuSE 7.3:
ftp://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/dist...3/disks/README

HTH

Cool