12 Apr
2007
12 Apr
'07
9:26 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Angel Martin Alganza once stated:
Here it's when it (finally) comes my idea... I've been trying to get
some modern Unix variant on my 486 notebook (no CD, PCMCIA NIC) for
quite some time now hithout enough (to my likings) success. It's got
16MB RAM, but, for some reason, it recognises only 12. And, of course,
12MB is not enough to run any modern installer. I've ended up running a
Linux distribution called Small Linux on it, but again, it's an old,
poorly maintained distribution running an old Linux kernel.
You could do what I did to install Linux on a 4MB RAM 120M harddrive
laptop computer---find a Linux distro that will boot (I used Tom's Root Boot
disk and even then it barely ran). The steps I ran through went something
like this:
On the target computer, I could run a shell, fdisk, mkfs and dd.
That was enough to get started.
Run fdisk. On the machine I was working on, two partitions: 112M
and 8M. Format the 8M as a filesystem and mount it.
On a full Linux system, get some needed tools like tar, dd to a
floppy. Move to target system, and dd tar off to 8M partition. So
likewise with some other tools.
On full system, I created a 112M file, and mounted it. Formatted
it, and put kernel, init, and a small /bin. unmount it. tar
the file and dd to floppy.
On target tar xzcf /dev/fd0 | dd of=/dev/hda1
reboot target. Once rebooted, reformat 8M for swap and enable it.
Keep using the floppy to get stuff over.
Took a few hours, but I got it done.
-spc (Wasn't the hardest install I did though ... )