[Techtalk] Installing Linux on an older laptop

[txjulie at austin.rr.com]

Conor Daly wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 08:20:27AM -0600 or so it is rumoured hereabouts,
> txjulie at austin.rr.com thought:
> > Robyn Manning wrote:
> > >
> > > Hi
> > >
> > > If your machine has a CD-Rom you could try Knoppix. Knoppix is a
> > > bootable CD that loads into RAM without touching the existing hard
> > > drive. It's great as a rescue CD also.
> >
> > Thanks -- I'll look into that as well.  I burned a CD already
> > with Tom's Root Boot thingy and it worked rather nicely.
> >
> > So far I've only seen floppy and CD mini-distros.  Has no one
> > ever made a ZIP mini distro?
> 
> Not ubiquituous enough I guess.  The lnx BBC (Bootable Business Card) 50Mb
> mini distro has build tools for building itself so you should be able to
> extend that to a 250Mb distro.

I'll have to look into that one.  I'd really love to be able
to take Linux with me in my purse.  Never know when I'm going
to need it ;-)

> For those "linuxy" times, why not use cygwin?  Or do you need _full_
> control of the machines...

I need it for recovery.  I keep a 5 or 10GB partition on every
machine in the house so I can use Linux to fix Windows if it
dies.  Right now recovering a machine involves re-installing
Windows, then restoring huge backups from the server.  If I can
boot Linux from a ZIP drive I could do a partition restore from
tape or DVD and save a ton of time =and= regain about 50GB of
disk storage that's tied up for Linux partitions.  The machine
with the DVD burner can definitely use the space.  At present
I make small (< 4GB) backups to it, then burn them to DVD.
That machine only has 20GB of free space, so I can't just
start backups for all the Windows machines at all once -- I
have to make a few, then burn the DVDs, then make a few more.

I've been messing with ZipSlack on one machine, but it has a
USB keyboard and I can't seem to get the machine to recognize
the keyboard.  I've edited modules.conf to load the USB module,
but it still doesn't recognize the keyboard (it knows it has
the keyboard, it just doesn't know what to do with it ...).
Worse still, it doesn't know it has an ethernet card.  So I've
been stuck bouncing back and forth between Windows and Linux
trying to get the card configured.
-- 
Julianne Frances Haugh             Life is either a daring adventure
txjulie at austin.rr.com                  or nothing at all.
					    -- Helen Keller