I have an low mem (8mb) laptop which has a 350 MB HD (64MB Swap, rest Linux Native), a 1.44 (only, 1.7, etc don't seem to work) capable built-in floppy, no way to connect to a network, no modem (at this time), but I have Zip 250 Parallel Port Drive... I'd like to Install Debian (or some other low resource Distro) by booting of some floppy, but then going to the Parallel Port Zip Drive for the base, additional drivers, & packages. Anyone know of any resources for this? I've already looked at Linux HOW-TO & mini-HOWTO and done a http://www.google.com/linux search to no avail...

You will have to boot a kernel with support for the parallel port drive, such as the iomega.s boot image. I think i got it from one of the older slackware distros boot disk archive (like 7.x or something). The drive will most likely be /dev/sda (as i believe linux is fooled into thinking it's an scsi hard drive).

I'm currently trying to get a working slackware installation onto a 100mb zip disk and running it through the parallel port on a 133MHz laptop with NO HARDDRIVE. Although, i've had some problems installing to the zip disk.

Check www.slackware.com for the sites to download the boot disk image.

oh yeah... and check out the "zipslack" section of www.slackare.com for other relevent information. Zipslack works by booting a DOS-formatted zip disk and then running a very small slack linux on top of DOS from that disk, but i'd just as soon leave out the DOS and run pure linux.

I even tried zipslack and had not luck. Finally gave up. I think the problem with zipslack was that it required way more memory than this machine had.