Hi everyone.

I was thinking about installing fedora on this really old computer of mine (it's a 486) just to see what it looks like and things. The problem is that my computer is so old that it only has an option to boot from the hard disk or the floppy drive. Since I am downloading the CD version of Fedora is there a way I can convert it to a floppy or download the floppy version of it?

Thanks,
Melissa

You can create a floppy boot install disk using the rawrite utility located in the /dosutil directory on the 1st install CD. The boot disk images are located in the /images directory and there should be a readme file too. The Redhat site also has documentation on installation using a boot floppy disk.

Due to the limitations of RAM, disk space, processor speed etc you might want to go with a smaller version. One suggestion for a better distro would be slackware or zipslack.

Ya know, I had a simiiler problem one time... the way I found around it was to create a boot disk with cd support using windows 98. After you boot to the command line, insert your linux cd, change to the "D" drive (your cd) and run setup or whatever kicks the install off.

http://vishalshah.org/node/view/81 A guiide to get core 1 is here

Limited puers benefit from eithe Slackware or Debian, BTW

How do I get the rawrite utility and images out of the iso file? Do I need to download a specific program for this? Also, would I need to get the rawrite utility and images from disc2 and disc3 (if there is one)?

Also, how many floppies do you think I'll need?

By the way, the computer I was planning on instalingl Fedora on is currently using Windows95.

Thanks,
Melissa

The floppy disk for PC that can not boot from CDROM. The floppy disk just loads a basic OS with modules to read the files from CD. Do you have a CDROM drive on this computer?

After you download the ISO file you then need to burn it to disk. Once this is accomplished you can then use any other computer to create the boot floppy disk I mentioned above. Any windows computer will be able to read the disk. With windows use the winrawrite.exe program instead.

Just to confuse the issue, if you are downloading the ISO files to the 486 computer then you do not need to burn the ISO files to disk. Of course you need enough disk space to leave a partition for the file. There are utilities you can download that will "decompress" an ISO file so you can create the boot disk like http://www.smart-projects.net/isobuster/

So how much RAM and disk space does this PC have?

If u are installing it through ISO images, make a bootable Floppy( may be Win98 or any other like), Extract the dosutils directory in a drive of ur hard disk. Boot using the floppy and just run autoboot.bat from the dosutils directory. No graphics installation option would be available and u have to install it in TEXT mode only.

Yes, I have a CD rom drive on the computer.

I'm still notsure which fiels I'm suposed to put on the floppy? I was thinking that I need rawrite.exe and bootdisk.img, but the .img files are 1,440KB which won't fit on the floppy.

The computer has:
16mb RAM
C Drive: (the original drive) 347MB
D Drve: (Was put in maybe a year or so ago) 3.71GB

Thanks,
Melissa

Don't worry about the img size. In DOS formatting, the max is 1.44mb (which we know is ~1.3 something). Rawrite will write in the ext2 system, I believe. You can put a 1.7 mb image on a floppy that way. Use rawrite to make the image. Put everything in the same directory and run rawrite from a command prompt (DOS box in '95). It'll tell you what to do (BTW, some images will require you write them with rawrite 3, which is actually a Windows GUI program. It works well too). Its easier than it looks. I remember my first floppy write. I couldn't believe that so much could fit on a floppy.

Okay, things are slowly moving along.

I put the files for the boot disk in C:\fedora\boot

Then I went into rawwrite and it said to use this for the comman in DOS:
rawwritewin [--write] [--copies n] [--drive driveno] file.img

Which is fine, but where do I put the path to the folder I want on the boot disk? Or does it ask me that after?

Thanks,
Melissa

rawwritewin is a GUI windows program. There is a browse button to navigate to the directory where the files are saved.

However, your 486 really does not have what it takes to run Fedora.
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/

There are several distributions that are capable of running on your PC.
You would be better off installing something like zipslack, slackware or Basic linux. For more distributions see www.distrowatch.com

Okay, I think I'll use Slackware. Is it the same process to make a boot disk with that, or do I need to find different files?

Thanks,
Melissa