Install LINUX...how would you do it?

[ol55]

I recently picked up a fully functional older Dell laptop. It is a 500 Mhz with 128MB of RAM / 20GB hard drive/ without any OS. I have a 3.5 external floppy and an external USB DVD drive. The BIOS will not allow you to boot up to a USB device. What would be the easiest way to get a full installation of LINUX onto the laptop? Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks

[je_fro]

With only a floppy I would download the latest set of debian netinstall floppies and proceed from there...

[blackbelt_jones]

With only a floppy I would download the latest set of debian netinstall floppies and proceed from there...

That's what I'd do.

[mrrangerman43]

Yep a floppy (http://www.us.debian.org/distrib/floppyinst) net install would be a place to start.

[bosox79]

yep a floppy disk install is the way to go. I missed mrrangerman43 post :o

[loopback48]

Not an opinion on how to install, although floppy/netinstall is the only way to go, but I'd also see about adding a bit more ram if you can. It will only make your experience with Linux that much better.

With so little ram, you might become discouraged. Bump it up to 512 if you can.

[ol55]

I appreciate all of your suggestions. Actually I have a Thinkpad 1.4 Ghz with 1.0GB of RAM dual booting XP and Mint 2.1 without any problems, and a dual boot XP Pro AMD 3500 with openSuSe 10.2. Even though I know more RAM would be better (isn't it always) I may upgrade later. I more or less was given this nice little Dell for installing and configuring a friends additional hardware and I was hoping to show folks (including the friend that gave me this laptop) that LINUX will work on about anything. Unfortunately I have Hughesnet broadband satellite Internet connection which is marginally better that dial-up as it is the only option available to me out in the country where I live. So with that being said I was hoping that there was someway to copy the files onto the hard drive and them install from the ISO, image file, or whatever that would be on the hard drive. So there is not any process like that currently available?
Thanks

[retsaw]

An alternative method would be to move the hard drive to another machine, do the install and transfer it back. The net install would probably be easier though.

If you actually had an OS installed then you could likely use that to bootstrap the installation.

[ol55]

Well switching the hard drive would possibly work...just like the old days with WIN98SE...the installation didn't have the machine specific security measures. So no one has ever fine tuned a process of just copying the image or ISO onto a hard drive and installing from the hard drive? Back in the old days you could also copy the cab files onto a hard drive and install from them.

Thanks

[leonpmu]

Then look at a light one like peanut linux. Use toms rtbt (www.toms.net) and maybe copy the install files over via network, or maybe toms now has the drivers for the cd-rom, or maybe you can modprobe the driver...

My guess is for that kind of machine, peanut/vector or DSL would work great without any issues.

L

[ladoga]

If you have another computer with installer files on it, you can use network boot to launch the installer. (given that this Dell laptop supports PXE)

My thinkpad has no optical drive or floppy drive so I had to boot installer via network.

Here is a good overview of installation methods. It's for thinkpads but most of it is universal:http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installation_on_ThinkPads_without_CD-ROM_drive#Installation_via_network_boot

[retsaw]

Well switching the hard drive would possibly work...just like the old days with WIN98SE...the installation didn't have the machine specific security measures. So no one has ever fine tuned a process of just copying the image or ISO onto a hard drive and installing from the hard drive? Back in the old days you could also copy the cab files onto a hard drive and install from them.

ThanksYou could copy the ISO onto the hard drive and install from that, but how are you going to copy the ISO to the hard drive without an OS installed?

I did this recently to test out Xubuntu and Kubuntu because I didn't want to burn a CD for them, but I already had a working Linux installation to set this up with. For reference I couldn't get it to work by simply copying the files (it didn't know how to find them), instead I used dd to copy the ISO to it's own partition and then used GRUB to boot a copy of the kernel and initrd taken from the ISO image.

[crow2icedearth]

floppy installs are so much when one fails...... :( i can remember back in 1997 when floppy installs were the most common way to install linux distros....... boy was it a pain .......

[ol55]

The hard drive has been FDISK'd / formatted so by using a Windows boot disk I did get the C:\. I

[knute]

General instructions (http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/)

Link to floppy images (http://http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/etch/main/installer-i386/current//images/floppy/)

Have fun with Debian :)

[Parcival]

With so little ram, you might become discouraged. Bump it up to 512 if you can.

I once had a Dell laptop with these specifications and Gentoo flew on it. ;)