Hi,

I'm new to LINUX and new to this forum.

I have an old Pentium II laptop with 128MB of memory, and I wanted to make it useful again by putting LINUX on it. I read that Peanut LINUX (aLINUX?) is the smallest, most user-friendly version available, and considering my inexperience and limited system resources, I thought it would be a good fit.

The instructions were simple. Download the file, burn it to a CD-R or CD-RW, pop it in the drive of the system to be imaged, and let it do its work. Trouble is, the latest version of Peanut LINUX is 760MB, and CD-R's (at least the ones I have sitting around) only go up to 700MB.

Is there a smaller version out there? Do CD-R's that are larger than 700MB exist (I don't burn CD's that often)?

Additional Newbie Questions...

Does LINUX come with a basic web browser, or do I have download Firefox or whatever, on my other system, and burn that to CD?

Can anyone recommend a good MS Office emulator (I'd rather not use Wine and run office itself. I'm afraid it will be a resource hog)?

Is there a good site to refer to for setting up internet protocols?

Thanks!

Lee

Welcome to LQ
AFAIK peanut linux is discontinued
See
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=alinux

I would suggest to take a look at
puppy, DSL or tiny linux
http://www.puppylinux.org/
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
http://tiny.seul.org/en/

Most distributions have everything included.
If not, you can use the packetmanager to install what you need

Take a look at open office
http://www.openoffice.org/

Good luck

Apparently there are now some CDs that can be burned to a larger capacity than has been normal up until recently. I'm not sure how common they are, if at all, nor what their cost would be compared to the regular capacity ones.

There are two other options to consider in this situation:

1) giving the "overburn" option to your burner program, which will *try* to fit the whole thing onto a disc that claims to be smaller than the ISO image. I have never tried this, but it stands to reason that it won't work every time.

2) I recently had the same thing happen while burning Ubuntu 9.04 for my roommate, and since we had no more CD's, let alone ones that were big enough to fit the extra-large image, I opted to burn the image to a DVD-R instead. This works fine, but is partly a waste of a DVD :/

Best of luck,

Sasha

Peanut linux is now called aLinux. See this link for the download.

-->http://www.alinux.tv/linux-downloads.html

See this link for what is in the download.

-->http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=alinux

Note, there are download and burning instructions on the aLinux site.

Most distros include at least one web browser. What they include depends on the distro itself. You can always download and install Firefox if you want to, and it is not included. I see aLinux comes with several desktops, including KDE. KDE has Konqueror web browser, usually. On a light weight system like you have, try Xfce. It takes a lot less system resource. If it works for you, do no bother with KDE.

M$ office. The answer is Open Office. Almost 100% comparability. You probably will never figure out what is not compatible, I have not yet.... Been using it for several years and several versions. Great program, and free.

Internet setup... This all depends on the type of internet connection you will have. Look in the Tutorials under Networking on this board. There is help there for setting up dial up, ethernet, DSL, cable modem etc.

You can always post specific questions. Linux started as a networked OS, so support is very good.

Hope this helps...

Thanks again to everyone!

So... I downloaded puppy linux and burned it to CD-R. I tried booting from the CD-R to my Toshiba Tecra 800 laptop, but it keeps come up to the Win 2000 setup. I went into the bios and set the CD as first in the boot priority and I did save the settings. Still, no joy. I put it in a memory stick, hoping I could boot from USB. Nothing.

The laptop has a damaged version of Win 2000, which I don't want to work with anyway. Anyone have experience with getting LINUX (ANY flavor) successfully onto a Toshiba Tecra 8000?

Thanks!

Hi,

You need to burn the iso you downloaded as iso, not just copy the files to the cd.
Take a look at
http://www.petri.co.il/how_to_write_iso_files_to_cd.htm

Did the light on the CD drive turn on when you tried to boot the system from the CD? If not, then you did not save the setting. The CD drive should be the first boot device.

Only newer BIOS's will allow booting from a memory stick. Do you have the option? If not, give up on that.

That is O.K. You need to get booting going from the CD drive, or some other device. Once you get that, then the installers for most distros have a partitioning tool. You can delete the partition that is there. Next Create new partitions, and format them with linux supported file systems. Linux supports many file systems. I suggest you format them to ext3 at first. That is safe and reliable. When you have more experience, you may want to use another file system, but for now do it the safe reliable way.