I'm a Linux newbie in the process of installing Slackware. So - I'm not sure if this posting should go in the newbie forum or in the Slackware forum. Apologies in advance if this is the wrong forum.

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My Machine:
IBM ThinkPad 560
Hard Drive 2GB
RAM 40MB
floppy drive: yes
CD ROM drive: no

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Distribution:
Slackware 10.2

This will be the only OS on the laptop - no other OS.

I chose this distribution because it appears that the laptop will support it, also this distro has the option of switching to a 2.6 kernel, which includes SE Linux, which is what I'm really after. (This is for a school project)

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What I've done so far:
1. I downloaded bare.i, install.1 and install.2, wrote them to floppy disks and installed them on my laptop.

2. I partitioned my hard disk

3. I have a shell and have some basic utility programs: cd, ls, pwd, cp, grep, etc., etc.

4. I selected categories of softare to install - but haven't actually installed anything yet.

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My questions/stuck points:


1. After selecting categories of software to install, the set up program prompts me to "Select source media" but there isn't any option for floppy disk.

-->Is this what's going on?
I don't really have any applications on my laptop yet and now the setup program is prompting me to actually put stuff on the laptop. (KDE, Emacs, ect.) If this is the case, is it possible to do this with floppy disks? The laptop that I'm using doesn't have a CD ROM drive.



2. Also - the machine won't boot on it's own without the intall disks.

--> Is this what's going on?
I think that the floppy disks that I've used only loaded the bare.i kernel into RAM and that's it. The kernel and also the boot program haven't actually been written to my hard drive yet. If this is the case, how would I do that?

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I'm thinking the obvious answer to my questions above are, "Get a real computer before trying this." But if it's at all possible, I'd like to see if I can get Linux installed on this old laptop.

Thanks a lot.
Gerald

The boot and root disks are only to start the installer. To actually get the packages to install, you need a source media. A CD/DVD, locally stored Slackware tree, or a network share with the packages on it. To actually use floppies as the source media, you would need probably 80 floppies for a desktop install.

What you are going to want to do is boot the machine with the floppies you have now, and also the network.dsk and pcmcia.dsk. Then use a PCMCIA network card to mount a Slackware CD shared over NFS.

If you have a pc that has file sharing on then the installer can go to that.

NOTE: I don't think that SELINUX is turned on by default in the 2.6.13 kernel; maybe someone here can verify that. I think that will need a recompile to do the SELinux.

oh Eric "alien bob" wrote this awesome script to get "slackware current" it takes some hard drive space on a pc there at your house, office, etc it downloads the current tree, then makes cd's, but also leaves the files on the hard drive too. You can install over your network from these. It worked really well for me.

http://www.slackware.com/~alien/tools/

Yeah, I usually do my installs over the network now with a Slackware current ISO. I get the ISO from one of the FTP servers that do weekly builds, and just mount that as a loopback device and share it over NFS.

In Windows, you could mount the ISO with Alcohol 120% or something, and then use Services for Unix to share that out to the Slackware machine.

I don't know but that would be interesting to find out. Worst come to worst you could have alcohol extract the contents too I believe.

Thanks MS3FGX and Old_Fogie for the replies to my post!!

*Now* I understand what's going on - why my source media choices don't include floppies (because it would take way too many floppies).

I see what I need to do now - which is to do a network install in one of the ways that you described - or - see if I can possibly find a CD ROM drive for the laptop and do an install directly from a CD.

Thanks also for the info about how to get the 2.6.x kernel. You're right, a 2.4.x kernel is the default.

thanks again!!

Gerald

I've found network install flies with old hardware.

Gerald1, If I remember right not all external (PCMCIA) CDROM drives are bootable from the 560 BIOS. The original unit from IBM - yes, many 3rd party drives - no.

Dennisk