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JumbledThought
03-03-2003, 05:48 PM
Hello. My dad had an old laptop lying unused in his garage and said I could have it. I've decided that I'd like to use it to do some word processing and maybe internet surfing - and learn more about linux so that when the game companies wise up, I'll be ready to install on my desktop :D The laptop is currently running Win 3.1 and Dos 6.1. It has 120MB hard drive and about 4MB of extended memory. It also lacks a CD drive.
Which floppy distro would be best for the computer? I'd like to wipe out windows and DOS and just boot right into linux if that's possible. From what I've been reading, zipslack is the way to go for small distros, but it's still 100 MB and that's a lot of floppies. I saw something called Keeper Linux that only takes two floppies but I haven't seen any ringing endorsements about it. Which distro would suit me and my ancient laptop?

mdwatts
03-03-2003, 06:33 PM
http://old.lwn.net/Distributions/ has to be one of the best for finding specific distros.

Some here will recommend Debian or Slackware as apparently they can be installed via floppies.

JumbledThought
03-03-2003, 10:04 PM
Thanks for the advice, there were a lot of little distros on that page you recommended. However, most of them were "on-the-disk" things and rescue disks. I've been trying various ones for a few hours. The one that came closest was fdlinux, but my computer didn't have the RAM to install it. :(
What I want is a basic linux distro with a text editor that I can install onto my hard drive with floppies. I looked on the Debian and Slackware pages and couldn't find directions for installing with the floppies. I'm a bit of a newbie, so if I'm not giving enough information about my system, please ask questions and I'll do my best to answer them.

michaelk
03-04-2003, 06:12 AM
From the website that MDWATTS posted check out basiclinux. It is supposed to run on 4mb. It looks like you down load a zip file (its approx 617mb) but then you could unzip it and rezip it to multiple floppies.

Just a thought