On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 11:22:39AM -0600, Stackpole, Chris wrote: > > From: news [mailto:n...@ger.gmane.org] On Behalf Of Stefan Monnier > > Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2009 10:28 AM > > Subject: Re: lenny on x86 > > > > > Does anybody nows if lenny installation on x86 machines > > > using floppy is (or will be) available? > I was given a bunch of Ricoh NP-50 laptops a few weeks ago. Nothing > special, but I have been having fun tinkering with them while I watch > Mythbusters / Dirty Jobs. They are Pentium 90mhz, 64MB ram, 4-6GB hard > drives. They have no onboard lan, one usb 1.1 port (can't boot off of > it), 2 PCMICA slots, no cdrom drive, and an external parallel-attached > floppy disc.
Sounds like a great laptop to have (it was free, I don't have one). :) Good for just lapping around on: mail, quich web search, writing, reading pdfs, etc. > I have been using the etch floppy images to boot[1] and mess around > with. The problem I am having is that all of the PCMCIA cards I have are > either not recognized by these floppies, or in the case of one wireless > PCMCIA card, it is recognized but I can't get it to attach to a wireless > access point (no encryption). Yet, on another laptop (Debian Lenny is > already installed) just about all of the PCMCIA cards work just fine > straight away. What about installing base Etch (don't even select "standard" task). Then do an immediate upgrade following the release notes, to lenny (again, you'll get base). Once Lenny's installed, you can add packages. You can do Etch base with the netinst.iso without networking. Lenny's netinst.iso may have the packages to allow an upgrade using apt-cdrom add, or it may install a tarball, I don't know. You may need lenny's bin-CD1.iso and apt-cdrom add it on etch. Another option is to boot Etch's installer in rescue mode and use the shell to transfer Lenny's hd-media to the hard drive. Perhaps pre-partition the disk as you will want it, but have two earmarked for swap. Make one of them ext2 and put the hd-media on it. Get a copy of grub-disk (there's a package called that or you can have grub make on if you have it installed on a box with a floppy drive) to boot, then point grub at the hd-media files (per the installation manual). Since the BIOS can see the hard drive, it should be able to boot it. Since you only have 64 MB ram, the installer will want some swap, so use the second partition you earmarked for swap. When the system is installed, you can mkswap on the partition with the hd-media and swapon it. Sure you'll have two swap partitions on one drive, but oh-well. Doug. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
