Dual Booting with VERY minimal installs

[Calum]

This is a dual booting windows/Linux question. I was going to put it in 'windows', i was going to put it in 'linux' then i was going to put it in 'lounge' but i thought in the end this was the most appropriate place for it. here goes:

Hello there, I recently bought this laptop computer:



specs:
Pentium 75Mhz CPU
540Mb HDD
Colour screen
sound card
video card
Extra memory slots (not sure how much RAM it has!)

I just bought this on eBay. next my cheque will need to clear, and then i will need to wait for it to arrive, and then i will know all the specs.
My plan is as follows, and i know it's ambitious:
I want to dual boot windows 3.11 for workgroups with linux running XFce. I want both systems to be able to word process using pdfs, and i want both to be able to access the internet. I am planning to read up on ppp though, as i want to write my own simple connection scripts rather than using some kppp type 'connection manager'. I plan to use opera as the web browser for windows 3.11 and phoenix as the browser for linux, and i plan to use word 4 as the word processor in windows, and i don't know what in linux. kwrite? kword? kword does not handle the

[Master of Reality]

you might want to try OpenBSD, its small and it doesnt come with any packages so you will need to install only what you need after the install.

You might wanna try runnning Windows3.11 on top of FreeDOS.

win3.11 will have to be on the first partition, when i tried it on the second partion it wouldnt work proerly.

[Calum]

i think i have found a good linux distro: Basic Linux looks like the thing, when installed on the hard drive, but i will look into OpenBSD too. As for FreeDOS, how can i even get a copy that will install? did you get it to work? i tried several times with no luck.

[KernelPanic]

Basic Linux is cool, I used that on a P75 before. It is based on slackware 3.1 I think?

[Calum]

well it says it runs some software from slackware 3.5 and i have downloaded some stuff that it says is compatible. most of the stuff i want for a home workstation fits onto 3 floppies! of course that does not include gcc and X which are supposed to be about 12Mb in total. i haven't tried installing it yet but it looks promising from what i am reading.

browser opinion please:
phoenix or netscape 3? Of course i would rather phoenix myself, but this is the netscape browser that BasicLinux recommends and apparently it is 2MB only! compared with phoenix's 7MB that is a significant difference, and maybe i should go for that instead. I wonder if there's an old opera for linux, i seem to remember that opera 3 for win3.11 (which is what i plan to use for a browser on that side, unless anybody has any better ideas) is under 1MB!

So browser opinions please, people!  

[ November 18, 2002: Message edited by: Calum: Linux Commando ]

[KernelPanic]

Give dillo a shot, I'm sure 300Kb is small enough for anyone  

This browser is very cool, it doesnt support frames, but hell its 300KB!!!

[Calum]

okay! will do!

so luckily you have used basiclinux, and presumably others have tried slackware, now i went here and could not find the files 'mouse' and 'startx', which this page says i need to install X properly. what am i missing here, does anybody know? thanks in advance.

[edit] just read the objectives page on the dillo site, looks very very good...
[edit] also, i already have the source for XFce and (presumably) for 'mouse' and 'startx' if they are indeed files, on my mandrake 9.0 CDs (i hope! i haven't opened those CDs yet, but i suppose they must be normal tar files, yes?), will these versions work in BasicLinux?

[ November 18, 2002: Message edited by: Calum: Linux Commando ]

[KernelPanic]

Calum you are reading wrong, it does not mean you need to download 'mouse' and 'startx'. They are commands. All of what it says in the box are commands for installing X.

[Calum@localhost calum]$ pkg  x332bin.tgz
[Calum@localhost calum]$ pkg  x332cfg.tgz
[Calum@localhost calum]$ pkg  x332fnts.tgz
[Calum@localhost calum]$ pkg  x332lib.tgz
[Calum@localhost calum]$ pkg  x332vg16.tgz

[Calum@localhost calum]$ mouse
[Calum@localhost calum]$ startx

Although, I'm sure they've missed the xf86config step.

[ November 18, 2002: Message edited by: Tux ]

[Calum]

and that would go after 'mouse' i suppose? well, i've never used slackware before, and although much of the trail has obviously been blazed for me, i think i'll be asking some dumbass questions on the way, but i do reckon it's time to partially shuck my mandrake 9 training wheels!        

now i read it back, it's obvious that they are commands, and that there are five files i need to download...

edit - MORE from calum's bumbling slackware dramas:
it says very little on this page about installing a c compiler in this new BasicLinux, and i am confused firstly about why the page doesn't seem to know what dependencies will be required. Also, i am confused about which C compiler actually gets installed! what would i execute to run it? anybody familiar with this.

It'sll be 2 weeks till my laptop arrives anyway, so no bother, and i am sure i'll hash it out if i have to by myself, but i just like to find out stuff before i try...

thanks!      

edit - by the way, how much do you think the laptop should have cost me? i am interested to see  how good or bad a deal i have got.

[ November 18, 2002: Message edited by: Calum: Linux Commando ]

[ November 21, 2002: Message edited by: Calum: Linux Commando ]

[mobrien_12]

As much as I love freedos and think it's really cool, I'd stay away from it if you want to do real work in DOS.  Stability and program compatibility is an issue, and windows 3.1x doesn't work on it last time I checked.  

If you don't want to use MS DOS, I'd suggest DR-DOS.  It isn't GPL, but it is good.

You can also install DR-GEM and a bunch of it's older programs for free.

[Calum]

well i do want to try FreeDOS since i know it has a free C compiler and also a GUI. Master of Reality pointed me towards a 36 MB downloadable iso for freedos, so i will try it one last time. However i did just buy a second hand (but unused) copy of MSDOS6.2 with WfWG 3.11 so that's what i will probably end up using.
as for serious work, all i really want to do is install MSWord4, get a C compiler to run on there and connesct to the internet, and i want to have fun figuring out how to make it happen. So far it looks like dual booting with windows 3.11 and basiclinux1.7(slackware 3.5)...

[Kintaro]

Get Dr-Dos for free from www.drdos.net (its free now caldera droped it years ago). And find yourself a copy of Deskview/X for DOS.

I would use Slackware/WindowMaker/Old Netscape/AbiWord.

[Kintaro]

Better yet get FreeDos, and then get the Arachne Web Browser for dos (graphical) www.arachne.cz

Bobcat is also good: http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/bobcat.htm

More from:
http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/


Hmmmmmmmmm.... What about PicoBSD, that rules!

[smokey]

Although I hate to say this running XWindows on a p75 will be painful. I run linux (mandrake 8.0) on a Pentium 266mhz Toshiba Tecra8000 laptop and XWindows is only usable when in something like blackbox. Even then it is sluggish.

[voidmain]

I have an old P100 Dell Laptop with 72MB of RAM and a 500MB hard drive running RedHat 6.2 and KDE. I actually have two hard drives, one with Win98 on it. It runs pretty respectably, even have Netscape 6 on it. If you open more than a couple of apps it will start showing the shortage of RAM though. Blackbox would be better.

I was planning on trying to install a non-X install of RedHat 8 last night but I don't have a CD-ROM drive so I was going to do a network install using the PCMCIA boot floppy. For some reason the RH8 boot disk doesn't like my PCMCIA system. RH62 didn't have a problem with it from what I recall. At any rate, I gave up on installing 8 on it. Haven't thought of a way to get it on there yet without network. And I don't have enough hard drive to download the install image and do a hard drive install.

[ November 20, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]