laptop installation

[Stryker]

I have this ancient laptop. an old 286 witih 60mb of hard drive space, and a floppy to work with. I believe it has 640k of RAM. Does anyone know how I could go about installing linux onto it via floppy disk drive? I have the RedHat 7.3 CDs, the Mandrake 8.2 CDs, SUSE Live Startup CD, Lycrosis Desktop/LX, Lindows (didn't have to pay either, but still don't like it).

[ October 16, 2002: Message edited by: Stryker ]

[voidmain]

Uh, you are not going to be able to install RedHat 7.3 on that thing for several reasons.

1) Won't work on a 286
2) Won't run in 640k of RAM
3) Won't install in 60MB of disk space

I don't recall the Linux kernel *ever* running on a 286, or on 640k of RAM. I started at nearly the birth of Linux and I'm pretty sure you need a minimum of a 386 and I think the minimum RAM requirement was 4MB (could have been 2MB). But I certainly could be wrong. I was once before.

But even if it would at one time run on those requirements, you would have to go back and find one of the original kernels/distros. I know for a fact that RedHat 7.3 will not run on it.

[ October 16, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[Stryker]

quote:Originally posted by void main:
Uh, you are not going to be able to install RedHat 7.3 on that thing for several reasons.

1) Won't work on a 286
2) Won't run in 640k of RAM
3) Won't install in 60MB of disk space

I don't recall the Linux kernel *ever* running on a 286, or on 640k of RAM. I started at nearly the birth of Linux and I'm pretty sure you need a minimum of a 386 and I think the minimum RAM requirement was 4MB (could have been 2MB). But I certainly could be wrong. I was once before.

But even if it would at one time run on those requirements, you would have to go back and find one of the original kernels/distros. I know for a fact that RedHat 7.3 will not run on it.

[ October 16, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

Well I have another laptop, also ancient, 60mb, 20mhz 80386SX 2mb ram, also floppy. Will it work on this, and if so, how?
I don't need any GUI, just gcc, pico, and very little of anything else.

[ October 16, 2002: Message edited by: Stryker ]

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by Stryker:


Well I have another laptop, also ancient, 60mb, 20mhz 80386SX 2mb ram, also floppy. Will it work on this, and if so, how?
I don't need any GUI, just gcc, pico, and very little of anything else.

[ October 16, 2002: Message edited by: Stryker ]

The current kernel can not run in that little amount of RAM. You would have to get a pre v1.0 kernel in order to run in that amount of RAM. And of course you will need an old compiler. Even on the first version of Linux you wanted 4MB of RAM or more if you were going to do a lot of compiling. With RedHat 7.3 and gcc 3.2 you are going to want more like 128MB or more of RAM. You could get a really really old version of Slackware  and probably install it but certainly not 7.3. The really old versions (like v1.0 of Slackware) were floppy distributions and could run in 2MB of RAM.