[NBLUG/talk] OS Alternatives.

[Mark Street]

Agreed....  I think RH 7.0 - 9 require at least 40M of RAM to install.  As
I recall I had that problem with a Gateway laptop awhile back.

The disk space is not as much an issue as the RAM is for installer
purposes.

I would go with a network Debian install and see if that goes.  Heck you
can install Debian on just about anything.

I still have that 486 with 32M purring like a kitten on an old Seagate
326M drive.  Smokin!

On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, Jeremy Turner wrote:

> 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
>