[wellylug] Linux on laptops

[Sam Cannell]

Potato?  Phfft .. noob. ;)

I had a 486 laptop with 3.5 meg of ram.  The Potato installer needs more
ram than that, so I had to use the lowmem bootdisk from Slink which let
you create a small partition, copy the installer floppy into it and run
it all from disk.  Once I'd done the slink install, I dist-upgraded to
Potato.

Even on my 33k6 modem, installing the packages took about one and a half
times as long as downloading them.

-----Original Message-----
From: wellylug-admin at lists.wellylug.org.nz
[mailto:wellylug-admin at lists.wellylug.org.nz] On Behalf Of Donald Gordon
Sent: Saturday, 18 September 2004 1:32 p.m.
To: wellylug at lists.wellylug.org.nz
Subject: Re: [wellylug] Linux on laptops

On Fri, 17 Sep 2004 00:10:00 -0700
Ian Sterling <xyverz at gmail.com> wrote:

> > My longest surviving Debian system started from *3* floppies.
> 
> Heh.  My first deb install started from four.  I guess you're l33ter
> than me. ;)  *snicker*

I seem to recall installing potato from six -- root, boot, 4xdrivers

But there was an option, IIRC with the PCI/IDE disks, to cut that down
to one drivers disk, for three disks total.  This didn't support
installation off PCMCIA NICs, though.  The six disk set worked very well
on the Compaq Contura Aero, which had a single PCMCIA slot, and a PCMCIA
floppy drive -- which stopped working when Linux loaded up cardmgr.  But
Debian didn't load up cardmgr until you'd fed it all the floppies, which
made it installable over the network :-)

Slackware, of course, only needed two disks for an NFS or CDROM install
(IIRC).