Parallel Conection to a Laptop?

[twistedmonkie]

i got a desktop running slack 8.0 and win98. and laptop runing MS-DOS 6.0, i want to get linux on the laptop (486, with 4megs of ram) and i've done it once with floppies but it didn't work properly, so i was gonna try gettin zipslack on there, and figured it would be easiest to do it via parallel connection, any ideas of how i could do this?

[Nekopa]

Hi!
I don't know if this will help you, but look at my post called Linux and a 486 in the hardware section, and it might give you some ideas... Sorry I can't help more, but I am a newbie :D

Or find a terminal program that will run under DOS, hook your laptop up to your main computer with a null modem cable and download files you need from your main computer using this serial connection

Hope it helps

Lee

P.S. I am originally from London, England, and since I have been in the US people have asked me "London? What, Ontario?" Nice to finally meet someone from there. :)

[ 20 September 2001: Message edited by: Nekopa ]

[de_lupus]

PLIP is the answer :) have fun with research

[ds801]

Most versions of Linux are designed to run on at least 8MB of ram, so I'd check the specs on whatever distro you intend to use before you start. And in order to get the laptop to use a 'network' connection requires that it boot some form of Linux first, but bootable install floppies have problems unpacking the kernel when there's not enough ram, geting the laptop connected to the other PC in order to install the files is a problem.

I've got an old laptop that's similar to yours, 486sx50, 4MB ram, 250MB hard drive, no NIC. I didn't try using a serial/parallel cable to install from another Linux box, mostly because I had no clue how to configure it on the laptop side. You can't use a normal Linux boot floppy, ('cause of the low ram problem), and AFAIK you need extra software to setup PLIP in DOS/Win3.1, like FastMove or something.

After a lot of searching, I found a floppy-install distro that works with 4MB ram, called Monkey Linux (http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/monkey/). It's kinda old, but it installs a full system, and it even has XF86. The big problem, is that the install files are *.arj files. The only utiltiy that was able to successfully unpack ALL the contents was the actual ARJ program itself, which is not freeware, and rather hard to find. All the *.arj utilities that come with other Linux distro's had errors trying to unpack the archives, reporting lots of "corrupt" or unreadable files.

Another option is to remove the laptop's hard drive, and install it into another PC, copy the Linux files to it, then put it back into the laptop and run the install (a distro that can install from DOS would be perfect for this). You'd need an adaptor for the laptop hard drive to convert the pins to normal IDE, but you can usually find these cheap at computer shows.

The best page I found for older/specialty Linux Distro's was at ibiblio.org (http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/).

[ 21 September 2001: Message edited by: ds801 ]

[ 21 September 2001: Message edited by: ds801 ]

[Nekopa]

Hello again!
Again refering to what I did, (newbie advice to a newbie) I didn't need to use PLIP to transfer files. I just edited the /etc/inittab file so that the linux machine would accept a login from a 'dumb terminal' on com port 1. Then you can transfer files using kermit or xmodem. But I wish someone had pointed me in the direction of PLIP before because I just glanced through the HOWTO for it and that does look like a better way. And the Zipham I used has 2 versions, one for a 386 with 4MB RAM, and one for a 486 w/16MB RAM.
These links should help you:
Linux HOWTOs and FAQs (http://linuxdoc.org) for PLIP and Text Term HOWTOs

Zipham Web site (http://zipham.free.fr/) and go to their English pages

Good luck

Lee