[wellylug] Laptop Toshiba 486, 540MB HDD, 32 MB RAM -- Distro?

Phillip Rose rosewong at paradise.net.nz
Mon Apr 5 22:04:45 NZST 2004


I have an old Toshiba Satellite T2130CS taking up (not very much) room, and
am looking to convert it from its faded Win 95 past to a more useful Linux
future. I would do just some basic emailing and maybe a little development
stuff, depending on what I can get to run on it. It has a floppy drive but
no CDROM drive. I have nfs going OK -- I can boot the Toshiba with Tom's
rtbt and access my Linux box (MEPIS, a Debian-based distro) via nfs. I was
thinking of VectorLinux (ideal size and footprint), but it doesn't offer a
network or ftp, etc., install, and the suggested method of using some
Slackware boot floppies just doesn't work on my machine. I get a floppy
interrupt error and can't proceed. Nobody else on the VectorLinux forum
could seem to get the method to work anyway.

However, I just found DamnSmallLinux (c. 60 MB)
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
where someone offered this suggestion:
==========
Get some single-floopy distro with NFS support and install from network :-)
On 560MB disk it looks like this...

-----------PREPARE----------
1. Do 2 partions: 60 MB (FAT) and 500MB (ext2)
2. Copy the DSL-CD thru NFS to the FAT partion(so the FAT part. will have
the same file layout like the CD !!! IT MUST !!! ) 
3. Boot DOS.Take a floppy with syslinux.exe
4. a:>syslinux c:
-----------REBOOT----------
5. The DSL shoud boot live, like from CD
>>> If you just want to have DSL live, like the CD , STOP HERE
6. Do a HD install and lilo setup...
----------REBOOT-----------
The DSL will boot up from the ext2 part.
Format the 60MB part as linux swap :-) 
# mkswap /dev/hda1 (the fat part.)
# swapon /dev/hda1 (the swap is alway good)
================
(DSL means DamnSmallLinux)

That looks cool and should work OK. I welcome any other suggestions for
distros, please, bearing in mind my lack of a CDROM. A nfs install would be
ideal since I have that working, though I suppose ftp or http would work,
too. TIA,

--Phillip




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