Installation on a floppy-based 486 (no CDROM drive)

[Zhan]

OK, here's the situation. I just received a 486 w/ about 4 MB of RAM and a 408 MB HDD, at no cost. I don't want to put any money into the system. There is no operating system on the machine, and I have no OS to install. I'm interested in running some distribution of Linux, but I don't know much about it. The system has no CDROM drive. Is there a distribution out there I can install via the floppy drive? If so, is there good documentation somewhere on how to do the install? If not, it would be great if someone could e-mail me instructions on how to do it. All I really want to do with the system is view/edit text files, so I don't need an extravagant setup. But it does need to be new-user-friendly. A GUI would be great. Assistance will be greatly appreciated.

[manux]

debian should do what you want. all you need to do is download the right image disk, and the base files. that's enough to get the system up and running.

[Linuxman]

Pygmy Linux installs from 6 or 7 1.44 floppies and give yo an option to install teh x window system. it should fit nicely on your hard drive, except that it may need at least a DOS formatted drive to begin with. Do a search on freshmeat or sourceforge to find it.

[georgesr]

There are a number of ways you can do this. I just did it on my sons old 486. There are two programs to get and you need access to a zip drive. Peanut linux is a minimized distro designed to run on older machines. It is a 50mb download and only takes 150mb when fully installed. It even has KDE running on a stripped down version of Xwindows. DLX is a text distro that fits on a single floppy disk, runs in a ram disk and is preconfigured to use the zip drive. Both of these distros can be downloaded at www.linux.org/dist/english.html (http://www.linux.org/dist/english.html) Borrow someones computer and download these two files. Place peanut linux tar file on the zip disk and install dlx on the floppy. Hook up the zip drive to your old machine. Boot dlx and use it to partition and format your hard drive. copy peanut linux to your newly formatted hard drive untar the file and install as per the manual. When the installation is complete remove the dlx disk and reboot. You should be up and running KDE.
I know you don't want to spend any money on the machine but I do highly recommend boosting the memory to 8 or even 16 meg if possible. 4 meg will cause your machine to run verrrrry slow because you will spend most of your time waiting while linux swaps to the hard drive. I hope this helps you out.


Originally posted by Zhan:
OK, here's the situation. I just received a 486 w/ about 4 MB of RAM and a 408 MB HDD, at no cost. I don't want to put any money into the system. There is no operating system on the machine, and I have no OS to install. I'm interested in running some distribution of Linux, but I don't know much about it. The system has no CDROM drive. Is there a distribution out there I can install via the floppy drive? If so, is there good documentation somewhere on how to do the install? If not, it would be great if someone could e-mail me instructions on how to do it. All I really want to do with the system is view/edit text files, so I don't need an extravagant setup. But it does need to be new-user-friendly. A GUI would be great. Assistance will be greatly appreciated.

[Shadoglare]

I've got a low-memory image of Debian running on a 486/25 laptop with 4MB ram. Downloaded the base image from their ftp which was something like 10 or 11 floppies, and then it lets you install additional packages over the internet if you want (or you can just pick out the specific .deb's you want and download em from the debian web page like I did). It took 2 or 3 attempts and a little luck I think before it worked right (the install has this glitch you have to work around where it creates a swap drive to start the install cuz of the low memory, then after the install starts it tries to create it AGAIN and it freaks a little) but overall not bad - if you decide to go this route I can probably give you some helping hints http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/smile.gif