[ILUG] laptop

[Peter Heslin]

I installed Debian 2.0 on my old 486 SLC monochrome non-pcmcia laptop by
copying the CD to a jaz disk, buying a jaz traveller adapter (ca. 40 USD in
the States) for my SCSI jaz drive in order to hook it up to the parallel
port of the laptop.  The throughput on the parallel port was very slow, but
otherwise the install was hassle-free.

This is obviously not an economical solution unless you already have a jaz
drive.  Perhaps something similar could be tried with an external SCSI
CD-Rom drive?

If you have an old laptop, you might check to see whether its hardware is
supported by tesing it with some of the floppy-based distros.  Try tomsrtbt
for pcmcia, etc. and muLinux (which, for those who have not tried it, is an
extremely cool thing) for X, apps, etc.  You might even find that
a `minimal' distro is suffient for your needs.  I ran monkey linux (fits on
about 5 floppies, a bit dated these days though) on my old laptop quite
happily until I decided that I needed to run TeX on it.

Peter (who latex'ed his 300 page thesis on that 25 MHz, 8Meg laptop)

On Mon, Oct 04, 1999 at 02:43:51PM +0000, 99179865 at tolka.dcu.ie wrote:
> Can anybody sujest a way of installing Linux on to a laptop which does 
> not have a CD-ROM drive or a network card.