To start out, I'd look for one of the floppy-based distros (tomsrtbt is probably the most common, http://www.toms.net/rb/ ). They may or may not have the driver you need for the network card. If not, you may end up needing to get a hard drive adapter and stick your laptop drive in a desktop machine for a while to copy your files. Another alternative might be one of the old DOS-based file transfer programs like FastLynx or LapLink, but you'd have to find another computer that could receive the files, and an appropriate cable. (Come to that, I *have* the cables, but I doubt I could find the old software anymore.)
As for what to install afterward, there are several distributions out there that should work on your hardware. You might try one of the BSDs. Slackware should also work well, or you might have acceptable results with something like Debian or Gentoo. Note, however, that running X in 16 MB of RAM is no kind of fun... > -----Original Message----- > From: Ross Werner [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Monday, September 22, 2003 23:17 > To: BYU Unix Users Group > Subject: [uug] Ancient Hardware and Linux > > > Well, I finally found enough time to locate a couple of floppies, > write the Red Hat 9 boot images to them, and try and boot my ancient > 486 laptop into Linux. Naturally, I wasn't expecting to install RH9 > on this thing (indeed it said I don't have enough RAM to do so)--I > just wanted to see if I could get Linux to recognize the PCMCIA > ethernet card using just the boot disks, enough to get me into a > network install. (It doesn't have a CD drive.) But poor RH9 wouldn't > even do that for me. > > So, my question is: what distro would you use for a laptop this > ancient? The first thing I'm looking for is something that will > recognize the network, so I can copy off all the important Windows > 3.1 (yes, you read that correctly, 3.1) files I've got on here, then > wipe the disk clean and hopefully get some kind of Linux on here. A > minimal X server would be nice if the hardware could handle it. > > Here's the full specs (so far as I can tell): > > 486 DX4 100 Mhz processor > 16 MB memory > 740 MB hard drive > SMC8036TX EZ Card 10/100 PCMCIA ethernet > 1.44 floppy, no CD-ROM or anything fancy > > And that's about it. Any suggestions? > > ~ ross ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
