Defragment your laptop's harddisk and then partition it to create two partitions - one for Linux and another for swap space.
Are you saying I should use windows to create 2 fat partitions or am I suppose to create linux partitions?Don't create FAT partitions but Linux ext2 and Linux swap ext3 partitions. My HP5700 partitions are setup something like:
/dev/hda1 HP reserved partition /dev/hda2 Windows /dev/hda3 49M of ext3 Linux swap space /dev/hda4 360M of ext2 Linux
I used Ranish partition manager which can be found on www.ranish.com and there is a simple PDF format tutorial on setting up dual-boot Windows/ Linux on the same site.
I had a Windows boot disk with Partition manager also loaded on it. The boot disk starts up in MS-Dos and from there you run Partition manager as per the tutorial. I used it to reduce the Windows partition size after defragmenting windows and then created the two Linux partitions required.
After that, I ran the boot disk and installed Linux off the hard drive image making sure to activate the swap space after the first install and then re-booting. Has worked fine ever since.
Regards,
JonamAnother trick you can use to install DSL on a laptop without a CD-Rom or USB drive is to load your dos-based PCMCIA drivers and then use a PCMCIA drive to transfer your DSL files to your machine. I have done this with a couple of minimally configured 486 laptops, and they both run DSL quite well, all things considered.
I've also used this method to install Win98 on similar machines, for the same reason, no CD-ROM or USB ports.
Obviously, the best case scenario would be that you already have an ATA or CF disk to use in your PCMCIA slots, and then use a boot floppy.
Since the DSL image is so small, you could get by quite easily with a 64Mb device. Win98 on the other hand, requires 128MB+.
You can get reasonably good deals on these types of devices from private sellers on eBay. Watch out for the 'dealers' though, they tend to want to price theirs like corporate america is still dying for one.
The biggest hurdle comes in locating and setting up the DOS drivers for your PCMCIA controller if you don't already have them installed and working.