[NBLUG/talk] OS Alternatives.

[Jeremy Turner]

On Wed, 2003-09-03 at 10:46, Steve Johnson wrote:
> I have a Dell Latitude XPi (Pentium 100) with 32 Megs of ram and a 2gig 
> hard drive.  I tried to do a network install (no cdrom) of RH 9.0 and 

My guess is that RH9 requires more RAM and hard drive space than what
you have, though depending on the options you select you could possibly
get by with the hard drive space issues.  The RAM issue is a toughie.

> well it tries to intall but goes real real slow, when I switch the 
> consol over to see what its doing its getting DMA time out errors when 
> trying to access the drive..  So anyways...
> 
> I made a windows 95 boot disk, booted up and formatted the drive just 
> fine under windows.. So I am wondering if Linux doesn't like this laptop 
>   =) Anyone have any experience with this?

I'm sure the same would work with a Linux boot disk and the proper
utils.  Maybe the RH installer is coughing?

> The main point of posting this is, I want to put a OS on this laptop 
> that I can install with out a CDROM.  Anyone know of any small OS's that 
> support PCMCI and networking (TCP/IP)?  I would love to just put linux 
> on it but my 2 attempts failed =/

What would be your purpose for the laptop?  Would it be a
general-purpose computer, or a web/email computer, or a router or
webserver?

I would highly recommend putting Debian on it.  I'll admit I would
probably recommend putting Debian on anything, but more so with a
light-weight computer like a Pentium 100.  You can grab two floppy
images (and disks) and then install the packages you need (x-windows,
blackbox or fluxbox instead of KDE/Gnome) and then install the other
programs that you want.

The floppy image info is at http://www.debian.org/distrib/floppyinst and
you can grab the actual images at: 

http://punk.uchicago.edu/debian/dists/stable/main/disks-i386/3.0.23-2002-05-21/images-1.44/compact/

The two images you need are rescue.bin and root.bin.  rescue is the
bootable floppy, and you are prompted for the root filesystem
(root.bin).

If you've never tried Debian, you should check it out
[http://debian.org].  It's really not as hard to install as some have
made it to be!

Jeremy
-- 
Jeremy Turner <jeremy at linuxwebguy.com>
The LinuxWebGuy
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