Laptops :: How to install on old laptop with 8MB Ram

Hi,

I've got an old Nixdorf Siemens, model pcd-4 ncsl, laptop. It has 8MB or ram and I'm not sure about the size of the hard drive. Around 50MB I think. No CD drive, no NIC, no USB. Only floppy, serial, parallel, PCMCIA, "AT Bus".

Windows 3.1 is running on that computer. I'd like to install a linux distribution with a functional GUI on it (DSL seems good).

How the heck am I suppose to get the thing on this dino?

I think you will find that you need at least 16M and a bigger harddrive for swap. If you can expand your ram and you could make your harddrive a swapfile then you might could run DSL on a compact flash with a PCMCIA adapter but you would have to use a boot floppy.

I don't know what kind of CPU is in a Nixdorf Siemens but I put another harddrive with DSL into a 386 with 8M and it wouldn't work. With your limited hardware you might want to try Blueflops or Basic Linux 3. Do a google search on them.

The lowest ram to boot into GUI with DSL was 12MB by user clivesay. It was not practical, but it, I believe set a new low ram record!

Finally I found out that the HDD was a 126MB. A little bit better. I'm currently doing some tests with Basic Linux... The game isn't over yet... I've put the files in c:\baslin, rebooted with a dos boot disk and ran c:\baslin\boot.bat. It boots. As soon as I run "startx" to activate the stand alone GUI, it crashes... The first time I ran startx, it asked few questions like "screen resolution", "which port for the mouse", etc. but now it just crashes. The error it gives (I could not read it all cause it disapeared too fast) was something like interrupt...memory...?

original here.