Top Document: Compaq Contura Aero Frequently Asked Questions Previous Document: 3.3.6.3 Conserving memory Next Document: 3.3.6.5 X-configuration for color See reader questions & answers on this topic! - Help others by sharing your knowledge [C] Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1998 13:08:27 -0800 From: bgeer <bgeer@xmission.com> Subject: 2.5" disk in desktop, Linux install, ... >Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 12:37:02 -0600 (CST) >From: "Allan 'Norm' Crain" <allanc@idea-inc.com> >Subject: Installing Linux on a floppyless Aero... > >[1] problem, though: I have no floppy drive. ... This is >going to make the Linux installation a bit of a bitch, especially since the >new hard drive is NOT bootable. I tried floppy-less Linux boot w/ RedHat & Debian & gave up. I succeeded with Slackware 3.4 cdrom's net.i bootdsk & pcmcia.gz rootdsk, using loadlin to boot them from DOS. The command line is something like loadlin net.i initrd=pcmcia.gz Oh, I forgot to mention I have a PCMCIA Ethernet card - once the install kernel was running, I nfs mounted my desktop's cdrom drive on /mnt & everything worked just like the cdrom was local. Check my URL http://www.xmission.com/~bgeer/laptop_aero.html for an all too wordy diatribe on my Linux install. So far, when it works, it works great. The Aero/Linux/Apache/PERL setup is a zippy little server of HTML & cgi-bin's. See below, tho. [Q] I'd like to also install Linux on my new Aero. The problem is, I don't have a floppy drive. [A] You would be best off by finding someone who could do the first phase of the install on an UMSDOS system, use ZIP to make a zipfile out of it, install the zipfile under DOS, and then try to boot a kernel with UMSDOS support off that. [A] Well, the one sensible way to install Linux for DOS-machine without floppy is to use LOADLIN command from DOS. That requires root filesystem installed to your DOS-partition and of course kernel file, which is loaded by LOADLIN. You can find LOADLIN from linux-sites from .../slackware/contents directory. There should be also more detailed instructions available. [A] It can be done (I did it) - there are at least two Linux distributions on sunsite.unc.edu that can be installed directly over an MS-DOS filesystem (usually in the directory C:\linux). They take 15 to 20 MB of harddisk space (plus any swap space you may want). Since X did not work satisfactorily for me in 4 MB of RAM, I removed Linux - (yeah, wouldn't it be nice to have that 20MB RAM and 700MB HD 8-). User Contributions:Top Document: Compaq Contura Aero Frequently Asked Questions Previous Document: 3.3.6.3 Conserving memory Next Document: 3.3.6.5 X-configuration for color Single Page [ Usenet FAQs | Web FAQs | Documents | RFC Index ] Send corrections/additions to the FAQ Maintainer: Philip Wilk <PWilk-aerofaq@ZenSpider.com>
Last Update March 27 2014 @ 02:12 PM
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