[conspire] my old acer laptop

[Heather Stern]

Oh yeah and I forgot to mention that Tom's Rtbt has editors in it.
1 floppy, no need to install anything.

Wow, that's a nice list of tidbits.  Maybe Dan will review which ones he
tries?

  . | .   Heather Stern                  |         star at starshine.org
--->*<--- Starshine Technical Services - * - consulting at starshine.org
  ' | `   Sysadmin Support and Training  |        (800) 938-4078

On Sun, Jan 05, 2003 at 12:30:53PM -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Dan (robxbob at LinuxWillBe.com):
> 
> > Conspirators,
> > 
> > while cleaning out my closet,
> > I found an old acer laptop running windows 95.
> > 
> > It only has a floppy drive.
> > 
> > Where might I find a "tiny" linux distribution
> > which would fit on 1,2,3 or 4 floppies?
> 
> Well, you could start here:
> http://dilbert.physast.uga.edu/~andy/minilinux.html
> http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/Linux/Distributions/Tiny/
> http://home.hccnet.nl/s.a.v.dijk/mini.html
> http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Mini_Distributions/
> http://links.hellug.gr/linuxl27.html
> http://www.eng.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~hgs/small_systems/
> http://www.geekhavoc.com/floppy.html
> http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Laptop-HOWTO-18.html
> http://www.northernjourney.com/opensource/linside/li008.html
> 
> You didn't mention how much disk space it has, or how much RAM.
> Probably, it has at least 8 MB, and I would hope at least 16 MB.  (Less
> than that is pretty painful with Win9x.)
> 
> If you're _determined_ to get Linux going on a machine as small as 2 MB
> of RAM and a 40 MB hard drive, see this page:
> http://www.superant.com/smalllinux/
> 
> Given enough hard disk space (e.g., 300 MB or so), you can put a fairly 
> liveable Slackware installation on such a laptop, working solely from
> floppy disks.  Unless they've... um..., slacked off, they still make the
> whole thing available on floppy images.  For that matter, you can get
> the Debian Base System via something like 13 floppies.
> 
> And there are some possibilities you might not have thought of, yet:
> PLIP is a method of getting IP (and thus, NFS, http, ftp, etc.) running
> over parallel-port "laplink" cables.
> http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/PLIP.html
> 
> With the aid of some other existing Linux machine, you can boot a Linux
> installation floppy, get PLIP going, and then install just about any 
> Linux distribution from the other machine (over the PLIP channel).  
> 
> And then, things are even easier if the Acer just happens to also have a
> PCMCIA slot, even if you don't (yet) have an ethernet card for it,
> because you can certainly borrow one for the duration of the
> installation effort.
> 
> > It does not need to run X, just vi.
> 
> If the laptop has at least _32 MB_, then I'd say getting X11 going is
> very worthwhile.  Less than that, maybe, but you won't get tremendous
> mileage out of it.  Less than 16 MB, don't bother.
> 
> By the way, you might be able to justify adding RAM to such a machine,
> even at this late date.  Call up SA Technology, http://satech.com/ , 
> and ask them how much.
> 
> -- 
> Cheers,                                      "My file system's got no nodes!"
> Rick Moen                                    "How does it shell?"
> rick at linuxmafia.com  
> 
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