12 Apr
2007
12 Apr
'07
11:13 p.m.
Subject: Re: Dreaming of a lean installation method [was Re: *nix
on"classic"systems]
From: Sean Conner <spc at conman.org>
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 16:26:58 -0400
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>
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.
My first stab at a server was using a 486DX/66 with 16mb though it did have a
NIC. the distro I used was slackware V2 something. It fit in 120mb with
space to spare and ran decently.
I also had it on a 486slc/25 with 8mb but a 360mb disk with only the usual
difficulties (less than steller installers back then).
What made the task resonable for both was CDrom drive. I did it once with
floppies (75 of them!!!) and that was painful.
Since I stopped messing with linux at caldara OpenlinuxV2.3 version level
I can't say what the latest distros are like but those older ones fit an
amazingly small machines if you took the custom path and didn't install
more than the needed packages. I got tired of all the versions and the ever
expanding size of the system required to just (barely) run it.
Allison
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 ... )