[Techtalk] Installing Linux on an older laptop

[Phil Savoie]

Hi Tabitha,

Do you have access to another linux box?  If you do you could cp the CD's to a 
directory and using dd there should be some kind of bootnet.img file 
(assuming Redhat or Mandrake).  You could download the bootnet.img file from 
the vendor and install using a mirror via nfs.  This would take a long time 
but would work for you. Let me know your options and we could work from 
there.

Phil Savoie

On Sunday 09 March 2003 17:11, Tabatha Persad wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm in a bit of a pickle.  I have this old Dell Latitude XPi machine,
> it's wimpy.  It has an SMC9000 nic in the docking station, 24mb ram, and
> just about a gig of hard drive space.
>
> I used to have Windows 98 installed on the machine, then explorer.exe
> died, and I was never able to recover the system so I wiped it.
>
> Unfortunately, all I had around at the time was DOS 5 and Windows 3.1,
> so I tried those, and then tried some solutions to get the thing
> networking, but to no avail.
>
> Does anybody have experience installing Linux from a floppy onto a
> machine that has no CD drive?  If I can just get my network to see the
> machine, I can copy installation files to the HD and do the install that
> way, but I'm a fair bit rusty, and I don't think my machine will handle
> something like Mandrake or RedHat (although I don't know for sure).
>
> I've usually done installs from CD, not from a network (I tried once a
> couple years back with no success), so I'm feeling a little lost.  If I
> didn't provide enough details, please ask!
>
> Can someone point me in the right direction or explain how I might get a
> Linux installation accomplished with what I have to work with?  I'm not
> fussy on distro - whatever will work on the machine I'll be happy to
> use!
>
> Thanks much for any advice!

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