OFB Community Mailing Lists

[N. Thompson]

Ed Hurst wrote:

> Taking ideas here...
>
> I was given another Gateway Solo 2500 laptop, but this one has a dead  
> CD-ROM. It's wholly unlikely I'll be able to get another CD drive for  
> this. The price on one I saw was nearly $100 (I don't trust Ebay, so  
> forget that). If I get it running with something, I should be able to  
> connect to the Internet and download anything else I need. Since the  
> floppy still works, that's the only way I can get an OS started.
>
> Thus, I need an OS that can install from a few floppies (okay, up to 
> 10 is  tolerable for me). This thing has a P2/233Mhz, 96MB RAM, a 
> 3.6GB  harddrive, all the usual ports, including two USBs. I don't 
> have access to  a USB drive, so whatever I use has to actually install 
> from floppies with  enough utilities to format the harddrive 
> (currently FAT 32), make it  somewhat useable and have sufficient 
> drivers to recognize when I plug a  modem into at least the COM port, 
> if not the PCMCIA slot.
>
> What would you do?


Well if you really want to know what *I* would do I might as well tell 
you :-) .
First I would get FreeDOS on the thing to see if it would work, then I 
would get DJGPP on a floppy and install that too, finally I would play 
around with it all until I either decided I liked it enough that way or 
I would find myself an RPM based distribution that can be installed from 
an floppy over a network or FTP and if that is not available I would use 
something that runs off a floppy or two or if I really got desperate I 
might try using a Debian based distribution that can be installed from a 
floppy but to be honest at that point I'd just put FreeDOS back on it 
and find a word processor, web browser and e-mail client for DOS.


-- 
http://celerate.blogspot.com/



-- 
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.3 - Release Date: 31/01/2005