Hi, folks!
Ok, here's the machine: 133 MHz (yes, *mega*, not giga or tera) Pentium! 48 MB RAM, 1.8 GB hard drive. (This is a Compaq LTE 5300.) It currently has a rudimentary OpenBSD installation -- it boots up, but X doesn't work and I don't really understand how the system is put together. (It's my machine for experimenting... and it has run Mandrake (many years ago when it would actually install on a 48MB machine), SuSE, Debian, and about a year ago I put OpenBSD on there, then forgot about it.) It has a floppy drive and CD drive that *SHARE* a bay, and a NetGear Ethernet card in the PCMCIA slot.
I got OpenBSD onto it via a network install floppy set. Previously, Mandrake, SuSE, and Debian were installed by either putting it into "sleep" mode and swapping the drives out, or passing "hdb=noprobe hdb=cdrom" to the kernel when booting.
Since I am fairly used to the way Gentoo works now, I am thinking that I could install it on this laptop, either using distcc to let my dual-P3 box do most of the building, or by using only binary packages. On the other hand, Knoppix has its appeal as well, since (if I could only get it to boot!) that would mean I could use the entire HD for just swap space and personal files. Yes, running it from a 4x CD would be slow and painful, but I wouldn't be trying to load KDE3 or anything... just Windowmaker or icewm or something lighter.
I seem to have read that it is possible to install Gentoo from binaries only, so can it be done without installing GCC? I know, why not just go with Debian or something (after all, that's what Knoppix is based on)... and the answer is that I already know how Gentoo is set up, and I'd much rather have the same system on both machines, as that makes administration and housekeeping easier.
BTW, I've just now found that I can (without changing a damn thing from whatever was already in place on OpenBSD) get into my files on the laptop using Konqueror and "fish://192.168.0.4/" -- so copying files to and from the laptop will be easy, though I'm not sure if any boot disks I might make on this machine will be able to handle ffs (OpenBSD's file system).
I *have* made a GRUB floppy, but when I boot with it and then swap out the floppy drive for the CD drive, and try to boot a CD with (hd1,0), it does not work. (The Knoppix floppy also does not work -- it says it cannot find any CD drives and drops me to a horrible shell.)
All I really need is, say, 25--50 MB, or even less, for personal files... and a laptop that can instantly become at home in any network (read DHCP) or *without* any network, just for personal use on the road.
My question to those who, perhaps, have tried something similar, is: Should I continue to struggle with Knoppix, or is there a good way to get
Gentoo on this thing?
My thanks in advance for any suggestions! :)
As much as I would like to run Gentoo on a machine like that it would be a big hassle to install not to mention keeping it updated even taking into account some of the things you menetioned and tried in your posting. I did install Gentoo onto a Cyrix166 computer w/64MB of Ram earlier this year and it took forever to install(about 3 days), I didn't even want to try a GUI install even if it was just something like Blackbox.
Since Knoppix runs in Ram and your laptop only has 48MB of it I'm not surprised you're having problems booting it up. Even with using swap space in addition to the memory I have a feeling that it would be a big headache.
I would recommend this:
http://www.ibiblio.org/vectorlinux/index.php?menu=1
It's a distribution made for systems like yours, mind you I haven't tried it myself but it looks good.
Kent
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