How do i download & run Linux on my COMPAQ Evo N610c for FREE?

Hello and Welcome to LinuxQuestions,

If your notebook comes with an operating system preinstalled you can use it to download an image of the Linux distro you want. Then, assuming your notebook doesn't have CD/DVD station, make a USB bootable drive of the image you downloaded using a free tool like Unetbootin. Once that's done, reboot your notebook from the USB drive and install your favorite Linux distro.

Kind regards,

Eric

Wrong. The damned thing can't recognize a bootable flash drive. Only Hard disk boot and multibay boot. So stupid machine. And for luck I have a floppy in the multibay so it is out of the question. I guess I need to take the HDD out, install on another computer and bring it back in... unless it uses some proprietary IDE connection that I can never connect to anything else with.

Although I need it for something simple, probably more time effective to cough the mony for an entry level new laptop... crazy

Kerhtut,

You are going to need to use a very light Linux distro, such as antiX, to run on that machine:

Download from:
https://antixlinux.com/download/

I suspect that your CPU is 32-bit, but do check first.

Installation:
https://www.antixforum.com/forums/to...or-install-it/

1 members found this post helpful.

I don't think OP is still interested. It was started in 2010.

But necromancer (#3 who, purists feel, should have started a new thread, per anti-necropost convention) is.

https://forum.plop.at/index.php?topic=260.0
The last post seems to imply it (miraculously) booted the USB when the disk-drive was removed.
(I'd love avalonit to try this, to see IF it's so!)

Alternatively, web-research ways to deal with a PC BIOS soooo OLD that it doesn't boot USBs.

BUT.... that PC comes with 256MB ram; max is only 1GB, so ... (DistroWatch.com/AntiX)
(Tho my Slackware15 VboxVM has 128MB & 88 pkgs, incl strace +elfutils for libdw dep.)

I believe in quiet the opposite for multiple reasons. And I wrote a blog about it.
https://rboci.blogspot.com/2017/12/w...cromancer.html

Too bothersome to remove the hard drive but it will be useless to me. The HDD uses this laptop interface that I have no way to connect it to anything else. Otherwise I wouldn't need to boot from USB.

But I'll check this plop boot manager, I updated the BIOS today.

The last thing that should work is using PXE boot. But it's a pita to setup.

Just dump in the trash. I just got hung up on this and probably have too much time over the holidays. There is no rational reason to deal with such a machine today.

BIOS shows 1280MB on this one.

tl; dr; eventual success but it turned out (as expected) that the efforts were useless.

A little learning came out of it though.


Plop is mostly a waste of time. I made plop 5 running off MBR. It has a script to install it there from windows. It hung though when trying to search USB no matter the USB options set in the setup.

Also it initially starts with a black screen untul Ctrl+PgDown was used to change resolution. btw this stupid compaq doesn't seem to support normal VESA modes as anything but the standard console mode made it turn black. See below.

Then I setup PXE boot on my OpenWRT router according to the OpenWRT wiki. And put there all plop version (5, 6 and plopkexec). This is the pxe config I ended up with

Keep in mind `DEFAULT Debian` is probably incorrect because boot ended up in the boot prompt. So I had to type `plop5` or whatever other label to actually start them.

On the compaq plop5 couldn't be started for some reason, plopkexec crashed with some kernel errors and plop6 got stuck while loading USB drivers. So no luck at all. I decided to try network boot on an old core 2 duo PC I had in storage as well. On it plop 5 and 6 didn't want to start and plopkexec worked to a point. It detected the USB but then computer rebooted when attempting to boot.

So that was about plop, no good at all.

One more point about pxelinux is that `vesamenu.c32` worked well on the core 2 duo PC but it resulted in a black screen on the compaq. I could select an option with the keyboard though and run it, just knowing what to do on memory.

So the next option was to try staging startup of the debian installer (the only solid remaining i386 distro I think). So I ended up with the `Debian` entry above, where I copied the files from the install flash drive to the tftp root. It was just substituting ubuntu config from OpenWRT wiki with the files I saw on Debian install drive.

I also tried to add the `vga=788` option that I saw in debian install flash drive grub.cfg but it resulted in a black screen on the compaq (while it worked for the core 2 duo PC.

Anyway, that `Debian` entry booted and installer reached the mount installation media step, where it failed. Either my OpenWRT server didn't work out or maybe I didn't setup the boot entry properly for Debian. Maybe it could be fixed by looking at the debian PXE install howto (that I didn't do).

I had the brilliant at this point to connect the installation USB media and ask installer to try again scan for installation media. And it recognized it! (although on the compaq the installer started in console mode, not the graphical mode).

Now finally happy and satisfied, I started the install. While installing packages though, the disk drive started to produce super strange screeching noises. I looked at the logs and saw some failed ata commands. installer soon failed, apparently the disk drive is defective or it requires some special workarounds. But that was enough for me. The old s*&^t goes to the trash.