An interesting/challenging set of problems

Forum: Laptops
Topic: An interesting/challenging set of problems
started by: Jaqie

Posted by Jaqie on Feb. 22 2007,08:18

Hey all. Maybe someone could help me with advice for getting DSL onto my little laptop.

First, I feel it prudent to list my knowledge.
*I am a long time PC hardware technician - a microsoft one. I know windows quite well and am extremely knowledgeable with all hardware.
*I know windows quite well - to the point that I know things a lot of windows sysadmins don't, but I don't claim to know near everything.
*I have puttered some with linux but not much.
*I have gotten proficient with FreeBSD and have gotten accustomed to installing and configuring it from scratch. I am comfortable to the point I can use it efficiently as a desktop OS, however I am not knowledgeable enough to use it as a server. I however am much more comfortable with windows and that is the OS family I run on all my machines most of the time.
So this all basically means I am unfamiliar with linux commands and procedures but am able to do as instructed and able to do some of the most simple troubleshooting on my own should the need arise, but not much beyond software wise, but I am a hardware expert. Please take this all into account when dealing with me.

With that said, on to the issue at hand.

I acquired a Toshiba Libretto 70CT recently. For those unfamiliar with them, they are a clamshell laptop as small as a PDA/palmtop but fully PC compatible.

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Cute huh? ;)
My laptop has these specs:

Code Sample

Pentium MMX 120 (200Mhz factory underclocked)
VLB/ISA based system
32MB EDO RAM (this is it's MAX)
1MB C&T 65550 VLB video attatched to
6.1" TFT 640x480x16mil LCD
A Single PCMCIA slot (important to note just ONE!)
PCMCIA floppy drive (uses direct BIOS calls this can be a problem)
2.1GB Toshiba 9.5MM high 2.5" HDD (takes most of the internal space of the lappy LOL)
Belkin PCMCIA (note pcmcia the system has no cardbus as it is ISA/VLB based) 802.11b wifi card (model F5D6020 ver.2) (seems it is an accton chip inside it from my investigations)
Yamaha OPl3 of some variation
IrDA port
port replicator with VGA, LPT, and COM port

I have tried installing OSes for it directly from another laptop, this does not work because the laptop uses a different geometry for the HDD then the other laptop I have (compaq armada E500) so installing onto the hdd from another laptop will *NOT* work, even boot sector is different.
I do have a ZIP100 LPT drive, this is how i got windows XP with nLite on it, but even with nLite I cannot get XP to run efficiently on the laptop. I also tried 98se but I never could stand that heap of an OS.

The task basically is going to be this: somehow install DSL onto it either using a *SINGLE* floppy to boot (because of direct BIOS calls changing floppies will NOT work - REMEMBER only ONE PCMCIA port so its either floppy drive or wifi card!) or do what I did to get XP onto it, which was boot to DOS, run GUEST, copy files to a second FAT32 partition on the HDD, install to primary FAT32 from second.

Anyone got any ideas? I have plenty of ZIP disks... and a few ATA zip drives, even one(zip100) in my main machine (xp x64 on a athlon 64 x2, with vmware and multi OSes inside vmware)

Thanks tons for reading this and for any ideas you may have

~edit~
P.S. forgot to mention the use:
it will be for me to stow in my purse for taking with me all the time for when a laptop would come in handy - without having to lug one around all the time. mostly IM, simple web browsing, note taking, etc.

Posted by anam on Feb. 22 2007,11:46

I might of misunderstood but

I Think the right way to do this is to copy the KNOPPIX directory onto hda2 and then boot from floppy, you ought to then be able to do either a HDinstall or a Frugal install (probably a better plan) onto hda1. YOu can then convert hda2 to either your persistant storage area or swap space as you see fit.

There are some fuller instructions on doing this around (think the wiki has them) but once you have the KNOPPIX directory on a hard disk partition its pretty trivial the boot floppy finds it automatically (in my experience)

Posted by humpty on Feb. 22 2007,12:17

If you can copy the /KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX image to one of the HD partitions, then you can boot from a DSL boot floppy. Edit syslinux.cfg on the floppy to tell it where the image is.

if you can boot DOS anyway, then it's faster to use loadlin.exe to boot. if so, you need loadlin.exe, minirt24.gz, linux24 and again, the /knoppix/knoppix image. see here: < http://petepr.hopto.org/dsl/guides.html#Boot_LoadLin >

(these files are found on the zipped embedded version, or from the floppy, but i recommend you extract them from the actual .iso version, cos it's the only versions i've tested so far.)

Posted by Jaqie on Feb. 22 2007,22:04

Thanks for your input. it sounds like this will be much easier then I assumed. I will have to read through all this again when I am not sick and really out of it. thanks for the advice

Posted by Jaqie on Feb. 25 2007,01:10

Got it, thanks for your help. *sigh* now on to other 'problems' that cropped up.