Laptops :: TI Extensa 560CD



I have a TI Extensa 560CD laptop that someone gave me . It is a petium 75 with 16 megabyte of ram and a 560 meg hard drive. The cdrom is no longer working but that is a not issue since it would not be able to read cd recordable disks or read writes even if it was working since it was not made to read them anyway. I do have serial and parallel ports that work as well. I have a pcmcia network adapter for it and I was wondering it htere was a way to shoehorn Damn Small Linux into it so I can get some use out of it to show trhe smart ass that gave it to me that it was not a boat anchor. The floppy works so I can boot into a script if needed. the network adapter is a 3com Megahertz 10/100 LAN PC card and drom what I have been told , it is pretty commonly supported.  :blues:
There are a few ways to install DSL that will work.

Basically, you need to get the \knoppix\knoppix file from the livecd over to your C:\ drive.

Once you have the file over there, you can make a DSL boot floppy and use it to start up the system and it will behave as if your C:\ drive was a CDROM drive and find and boot up DSL.

The easiest way is to boot into MSDOS or Windows95 with networking and connect to a network share or to an FTP server and copy the file over to your C:\ drive at C:\knoppix\knoppix.

Plan "B" is to get a copy of Tom's Root Boot (tomsrtbt Floppy disk based linux distro) and get the "Frugal Light" script from the DamnSmallLinux download site.  You can then use the floppy linux to install DSL from over the network.

Plan "C" is painful, but it works.  Basically it involves using something like rar or pkzip to move the 50MB knoppix file over to your C: drive using a giant ZIP or RAR archive that spans over a bunch of floppy disks.. IE: Insert disk 1 of 34 and press enter to continue.  You don't need 34 floppy disks because you can re-use the floppies again and again but the process can take some time.

Finally, you can pull the hard drive and buy a cheap laptop hard drive adapter for under $10 and plug it into a desktop PC and install DSL on it.  Then put it back into the laptop and you are in business.

There is some good info about the floppy method in the DSL documentation site and maybe the other methods, too.

Otherwise, you can search the forums for more details.

The forums here are strange because they are based on "OR" logic instead of "AND" logic, so here is an example of how to search:

Keywords:

floppy AND only AND install

Search ALL FORUMS
FROM THE BEGINNING or NEWER

other example keywords are:

*poorman*

*frugal_lite*

*rar*

Good Luck.
Also, you could take the hdd out and hook it up to another computer and install from the other computer.

Even a desktop will work, if you have the proper adapter.

-J.P.

original here.