I've got an old laptop that I'd like to use as a terminal. I have a parallel cable to connect the two computers. I know there is some way to do this with a serial cable, but I don't have one. It's a really old laptop: no hard drive, low-density floppy drive. All I really need is to know what boot disk use, and know how exactly to set this up. Thanks!

No hard drive? Laptop? That's impossible. They were putting hard drives in computer back when they called them "portables" and they were the size of the suitcase with a 4 inch tv display...

DId you remove the hard drive or did it fail?

Low density floppy, 3.5 inch? 5.25 inch? 8 inch?

There's a lot of low densitys, bigger the disk, lower it gets, but I'll assume you mean 3.5
No pcmcia slots? Or could you plop in a network card and use that to connect.

But, just so you can have some real fun, here's the answer
You'll need to find a linux distro small enough to fit on a floppy disk, and have the commands and programs need to run through this tutorial...

PLIP
http://turing.uiah.fi/tarmo/text/plip.html

I suppose you could also try compiling your own micro kernel and using it with a small linux distro... Might be able to get by with using a 2.2 series or earler even. heh

Thanks for the link.

The 20 megabyte hard drive failed years ago. And the floppy is a 3.5" drive. No PCMCIA, either. I'm worried that it may be too old. Is a 8086 too old for this?

"The 20 megabyte hard drive failed years ago"
You can usualy pick those things up for like 5$ now. heh If you know what kind it is that is.

8086? Ah, yeah, just a little. Linux defaults to i386 as the lowest... Maybe one of the very very very very very early kernels would run, but it might not have the proper parallel support.

Newest laptop I've got is a 286. Oh well...