Old Laptop Distro???

[Jerry McBride]

On Saturday 18 December 2004 05:28 pm, Alma J Wetzker wrote:
> I listen avidly to the new distro's that abound.  I have a question:
>
> I have an old compaq armada (4131T) with 80 MB of RAM and a 4 GB drive.  It
> will not boot from the CD.  I want to set it up to X into a faster machine.
> What distro should I put on it?
>
> I gather that I need to, at least, start with a 2.4 kernel (2.6 will not
> fit on a floppy.)  It runs 802.11B and needs to pickup that card.  It does
> not have cardbus but the old PCMCIA 16-bit slot.  There are no USB
> connections.
>
> I was thinking of slack but is there a better way?  All I really need it to
> be is an X-terminal.
>
> (A suggestion or two on HOW to get it done would be helpful also.)
>
>      -- Alma
> 

Now days, I'm not real sure what to suggest, Alma. However, back in the 
OpenLinux 2.40 and 3.11 era... I used to install OpenLinux via dos/loadlin 
off the OpenLinux distribution from an IDE cdrom attached via pcmcia. Worked 
very well too, since Caldera supported this method of installation. 

Since your laptop seems to have an internal cdrom drive, it has to be a lot 
easier than I had it. 

What I did was set up a small dos partition that I could boot into. I made it 
small, since I would use it under linux as reformtted swap space. PCDOS 2000 
worked like a charm here... I gave the dos install enough brains to load the 
pcmcia, ide drivers, along with cdrom support. Once booted into dos and I 
could access the OpenLinux cd... I simply copied over the utils that I needed 
to perform an OpenLinux install from a dos partition... It worked everytime. 
You end up with a small dos partition and however many ext2 partitions for 
openlinux. After making a custom kernel and running lilo, the first boot into 
linux, I would scrap the dos partition and used it for swap space. Boing, 
nice fresh,minimal install O.L. 

Wow, those were the days.

Whether or not current distros provide or support this manner of install, I 
don't know. Support for old hardware is diminished with each and every new 
release of software and hardware distributions and loadlin may have been an 
early casualty.

Good luck. Let us know how you make out with your project.

Jerry

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