Question of curiosity. I have a Toshiba Pentium 166mhz, 32megs of ram, 4gig hard drive, a non-bootable CD-ROM, an external bootable floppy drive, and no network card.

I have tried the sbootmgr.dsk to try and make the CD-ROM bootable with no luck.

I have successfully installed NetBSD using their two floppy laptop boot disks, and then the NetBSD CD-ROM as the location of the packages after the laptop boots off of those two floppy disks. It worked slick, and I have been happy running this old laptop as a CLI only machine using it as a writing machine using vim and keeping my calendar with remind.

I'm wondering if Slackware has a similar way to install using 1 or 2 boot floppies and then using the CD-ROM as the source for the install packages, but the install is basically running off of the floppies.

My reason for asking is that I have more experience with Linux, and maybe I could figure out a way to get X working, because I have not found a way to get started on that under NetBSD, and perhaps I can figure out ways to mount USB sticks as a plain user instead of as root under NetBSD. The BSD's are just a little different animal than what I have become used to.

Is it worth the try, or should I just stay where I'm at with NetBSD on this old, old laptop. Understand this is more of a hobby project than a needed computer. My main work desktop is Fedora 8 right now, but Slackware with KDE 4.1 is looking interesting. :-)

Thanks for directing me to any reading materials that are posted on the network on this subject.

mowestusa

I think it is possible, but I would use Slackware 11.0 or less so you can have an actual bootdisk that contains a kernel, so you can boot straight from the floppy.

Don't know about the disk you mentioned. but 8.1 you can do it with six disk. you need bare.i and insall disks 1-5 once it is running from floppy put the install 1 back in and type setup. then follow prompts. you do have to know about mounting file systems in linux though. I think you can also do it by formating a 10mb boot partion and loading dos or freedos and using lilo to boot the cd. with 166 mhz I would not go over version 9.0

I used three floppies to boot an 150 MHz Pentium Pro. Slackware version was 9.1 and I think that was most recent version for floppies - so with newer versions you need a booting CD.

Take a look at 8.1 or older and in the folder marked boot you will find bare.i and the 5 install disks you need. Load them and it insalls in ram then stick install 1 disk back in the floppy drive and type setup. after you setup 8.1 you can do an upgade. I have a 133MHZ proccessor I do not think it is fast enough for 9.1 but I could be wrong. I found the smart boot manager disk so now I have to learn how to use it. anybody know how to do this.

dvdljns,
First thanks for the info. Is Slackware 8.1 still supported? It probably doesn't matter because I doubt that the laptop will ever be networked, but I thought I would ask.

Second, my experience with "Smart Boot Manager" is that it is great if the computer supports it. I have used the disk with many Pentium 1's and 2's with success. You should be able to just create the disk with the dd command, and then boot and it will offer you a boot menu. You can then pick the drive that you want to boot and it will work. I however could not get it to boot the CD-ROM in my Toshiba laptop. Even with Smart Boot Manager only the floppy drive and hard drive would boot, the CD-ROM could be selected, but nothing would happen. However, with NetBSD I could do a boot from two floppies, start the installer and then access the regular bootable i386 CD and install all of the packages from their. It was a sweet deal how that worked. But once again, using the Smart Boot Manager with any bootable CD never worked for me. So it must be that certain computers can't boot from the CD-ROM, but I could be wrong.

[QUOTE=mowestusa;3261806]dvdljns,
First thanks for the info. Is Slackware 8.1 still supported? It probably doesn't matter because I doubt that the laptop will ever be networked, but I thought I would ask.
[\QUOTE]

It is in the suported section.


[QUOTE]
Second, my experience with "Smart Boot Manager" is that it is great if the computer supports it. I have used the disk with many Pentium 1's and 2's with success. You should be able to just create the disk with the dd command, and then boot and it will offer you a boot menu. You can then pick the drive that you want to boot and it will work. I however could not get it to boot the CD-ROM in my Toshiba laptop. Even with Smart Boot Manager only the floppy drive and hard drive would boot, the CD-ROM could be selected, but nothing would happen.[\QUOTE]


Nothing happens for me at all I do not even get a menu.
[QUOTE]
However, with NetBSD I could do a boot from two floppies, start the installer and then access the regular bootable i386 CD and install all of the packages from their. It was a sweet deal how that worked.[\QUOTE]

I need to check on netbsd or maybe a more standard vesion of bsd would work. If you get 8.1 installed and working please let me know what steps you took to do it. I really want slackware but I will load what I can to learn.
You know when I looked it up on the web I did not find anyplace where someone said they got it working. At least a few people post saying that it works now and what they did to solve the problem or something but not with smart boot.

Was you able to run setup.

Pull out the HD, put it into a USB HD enclosure, install necessary stuff using another machine, and plug the HD back into the ancient computer.

In the case of Debian, I often set up to start the install from the HD and then recover the small partition I used for the *.iso file and kernel + initrd for use as swap space.

Aside from that, the only install method I can think of would be to custom-build an install floppy with just the right drivers - not a trivial job at all.

32MB is pretty small - I doubt X + window manager can run on that but you have to try it to see. Go for the smallest WM possible (KDE and GNOME cannot possibly run well on that system).

I just read a comment by IsaacKuo on another thread - he says he uses a machine with 32MB RAM running X and IceWM - so that may work well for you. Just check the dependencies of other software before installing them; you don't want to pull in the GNOME and KDE libs.

umm.. 12.1, install disc 1 contains directory called isolinux and inside that you should find sbootmgr.. it should allow you to boot from "non-bootable" cd-rom drive.

Just use another computer and write sbootmgr.img to floppy (check readme.txt in isolinux/sbootmgr directory) and you are good to go.

Eveybody wants the latest and greatest. If you read the minimal requirements on 12.1 I think you will find his comp does not meet them.

Thats why I stopped building older comps with windows everybody wanted the oldest comp they could find then wanted XP on it. It does not work that way.

I'd recommend you use Slack-11.0 and use the install.zip method to install. Using the installer floppies requires 64MB of RAM. if you use the install.zip installer you can do it with less RAM.
You may be able to do it with Slack-9.1 but I doubt it. You need to read up on the requirements for installation -I don't remember how much RAM was needed by the 9.1 installer floppies...

I am sorry but that is not correct. I only had 32MB of ram when I did it.


Don't know.did not do it that way , so maybe.

[/QUOTE]

Does 9.1 install by floppy?