I got an old computer with no possible cd-rom installation. I looking for a way to install slackware linux with floppy disks but it seems like newer version cannot be installed that way. Am I wrong? Should I try to install an older version and which one?

I'm a linux newbie, maybe I didn't look for the right thing but if someone can help me it would be nice .

Ouch, the floppy installation support was dropped a ways back, I forget which version though. If I were you, I'd spring for a NIC and install it across a network before I'd do a gazzilion floppies.

You can start with zipslack, it will boot from FAT partition, available
from ...slackware-10.1/zipslack/split -- 35 floppy images.

Look for ZipSlack on www.slackware.com

Slackware network install takes three floppies to boot, another for network driver,
but requires NFS export from a running linux box, catch-22.

There are several NFS servers available for Windows as well. Some of which are available in a full featured 15 day trial download, like Onmi-NFS.

I stand corrected, in that case you can do a three floppy boot (bare.i, install.1, install.2) plus (pcmcia.dsk if laptop) plus network.dsk -- I have done the five floppy install on old IBM 365X floppy only laptop. I ran mixed system samba + NFS, never occured to me to try and get windows talking NFS, after all they've only had tcp/ip for ten years (Win95+) )

I just did the floppy to NFS method. I didn't try Omni-NFS but I did try several others. The best out of my group was probably DiskShare (i think i needed 3 steps to setup an anony shared folder).
Additionally, if your NIC is a pcmcia card you may not need the network disk at all. I had an older 3com dual modem/NIC PCMCIA card that gpot recognized and up and running straight rom the pcmcia.dsk without the network disk. Do an ifconfig, a route and you should be good to go.

Forthe record, the other two major methods I tried for NFS were:
SuperNFS - i couldn't tell you how well the software woked since they never sent me the necessary demo key to unlock it :P
Windows Services For Unix (SFU 3.5) - whee, I'd advise not touching this unless your really serious about running NFS on Windows. if you need a short-term anony access folder and you have barely touched NFS before, I'd suggest staying far far away form this. I got stuck in one of those awful "Cannot start service A, service B not started...cannot start service B, service A not started" loops...although it could be because I didn't know what I was doing and was following their directions (and yes, i am bitter, crashed VS.Net twice today because of inadequate sandboxing in debug mode).

I've never used any of the other NFS servers available for Windows, except Omin-NFS. But it's setup is very very easy as well. I'm not promoting it by the way, just offering an observation if you want to use it. Personally, I'd go with whichever one gave me the most in the trial version. But then again, you'll probably never use it again, so no matter. What would be idea would be to find a linux boot floppy with NFS support. That way you could just pop that in anytime you needed it for such as this. I don't know if there is one available or not, or even if it's doable on a single floppy given the limited space. But alot of the live CDs like Knoppix have it.

Also there is a gotcha when installing Slackware in this manner. When you specify the path to the NFS share make sure you specify the complete path to the directory that contains all the Slackware packages (ie the one with a, ap, d, and so on) vs the top level directory. If you don't then Slackware will install at light speed, only you don't actually get anything at all installed. Someone should really report that bug to Pat, I guess.

The problem I had with that method was that the PACKAGE LIST file in the slackware/ directory was empty. I'm not sure if it got copied over by the second ISO or what, but what I ended up having to do was copy the one from on diectory higher and the search and replace on "./slackware/" with "./" to fix the paths. Unfortunatly, while it seems rather obvious in hindsight, it took me a while to think of that :P

Package list? Hmm, I'd be surprised if the setup program used that file at all. It should work off the tagfiles located in each package group's directory.

there's a tool on the first install cd on 10.1 that allows systems to boot from cd that usually cant. i forget what the name of it is. have a scout around and you'll find it.

Thanks for the answers, I'll try to install Zipslack from floppies and if it doesn't work I think I'll try installing with Slackware with NFS. Can Zipslack run everything Slackware run?

edit>> The zipslack installation didn't work well, if I want to try with NFS do I have to have specific knowledge about it?

Thank you for that note about pcmcia.dsk loading CardBus NIC, last time I tried with a Xircom RBE-100 I couldn't find the driver... Doh! Already loaded... Saves me burning cd2.

To the others asking about NFS mountpoint, you need to specify complete path, example '/home/install/slackware-10.1/slackware', the directory with MANIFEST.bz2 in it. You'll find NFS easier to setup if you get the network card up and can ping NFS server first.

Cheers,
Grant.