Richard Wright wrote:
Hi Gordon
I have had a crack at booting it from a floppy disk, but there simply isn't
enough space on the floppy to boot it up effectively. In fact even the
rudimentary commands on the single floppy crashed as soon as the commands were
issued.
There should be two or three floppies - a boot kernel and a root
filesystem. You could, of course, try something like tomsrtbt which
*is* a single-floppy distro.
The USB port on the docking station made us think that we could install it from
a USB pen. Of course when we looked at BIOS the only options to boot were hard
disk and floppy disk.
Uhm, no way. It's far too old to support booting from USB.
This leads me to believe that there are two options now to install linux on the
libretto. One is to find a cd drive for the libretto and install a CD that way.
This may be a good idea since a lack of cd drive will cause problems later on
anyway.
Not having a CD drive later on will not be a problem at all. That is
what NFS is for.
If you're using Slackware you can just download the packages and use
installpkg to get them across, or use swaret. Other distros have
different kinds of package manager - Debian has probably the best
packaging system (but I won't get into what's *wrong* with Debian ;-) )
The other option is to remove the hard drive as you suggest and plug it in to
another machine and install ti that way. This is the way I want to go since it
may be a while before I locate an appropriate CD drive.
What I need to know from you is how to remove the hard drive from the libretto.
We had a look but we could only discern a way to remove the battery. I hope
that removal of the hard drive does not require hardwware such as screwdrivers
etc. This is because the machine is really my Dad's and would hope not to rip
it apart irreparably!
Left hand end of the unit, there is a small plastic cover with two
screws on the bottom. Remove the screws, lift the cover off and pull
the handle gently to remove the drive. Refitting, as Mr Haynes might
say, is the reverse of removal.
Any further advice you can offer about removing the hard drive would help me
immensely.
It's that simple. You can get 44-pin IDE adaptors from eBay fairly
cheaply, or I could (if I can find one) lend you one. Or you could just
bring it round some time. It's also possible to put it into a laptop
that does have a CD drive, but don't be too fussy about setting up
things like SVGA console modes (in fact, *don't* set that up until you
know what the Libretto is going to do).
Other than that, all the standard "first install" hints apply. Keep it
simple, you've only got a couple of gig of disk. You won't have
accelerated 3D, you've probably only got 2M of screen memory and you
definitely don't have enough memory for shiny antialiased fonts! Once
you get as far as installing X, I would suggest sticking to IceWM or
fvwm2 or similar.
Gordon.
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