ubernewbie gets confused

[ethersby]

Hello, all.

So, after years of claiming that knowing how a computer operates is irrelevent in my life, I read two Linux books cover to cover last week and installed Red Hat Linux on my computer about five days ago. I've got a long way to go, but I'm a fast learner.

I can do pretty much what I want to there just fine (at least everything I've tried so far), but the situation gets tricker. I am in the process of acquiring a 486 laptop with no cd rom drive, and I would LIKE to switch over to using that as my primary computer, but am completely muddled in trying to figure out how to get linux onto it. The computer (I think! I haven't actually seen it yet!) has no network card, so I can't do it that way, and I'm told that it is possible to do it with a big pile of floppies, but I can't seem to figure out how to do that either. I got adventurous and tried to download mulinux, but for some reason it was unable to create the floppies it said it could create. I have the Red Hat distribution CD, but I'm not very well versed in Windows either and don't have a clue how to do things like break up large files onto little disks.

I feel like I'm trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. I would greatly appreciate any suggestions as to how I ought to go about this.

ethersby

[michaelk]

Maybe I shouldn't ask but someone might at to why you are switching to a 486 laptop for your primary computer. How much HD space and memory do you have?

I haven't tried any of these small distros but there is peanut linux, PCYip or LOAF.

You don't specify the RH CD distro you intend to install but if it is 7.3 then the 486 does not have the power to run it.

[i_like_peanut_butter]

You could try Slackware, particularly an older version. It originally came in floppy sets, and is still organized that way even though now most everyone installs it from CD-Rom.

[ethersby]

Okay. I'm now trying to install Slackware 3.3, and it goes fine until I try to install software. Then I get a message that I don't have the right disk. I think the problem is the index file on the a1 disk is corrupted somehow, so I tried to re-download that file from a couple of different mirror sites but no luck, it still won't work. Any ideas?

btw I would rather use this (486, 40MB RAM) than my aging pentium (16 MB RAM!) because it is smaller and will fit in a bag. I move around a lot.

[mdwatts]

Find a distro at http://old.lwn.net/Distributions/ that will run on those specs.

[kam]

OK, I can't help but recommend that you get a newer laptop! You could at least get a 200-300 MHz with CD-ROM. I would think you want a network card too, to get online.