Panasonic Toughbook

Forum: Laptops
Topic: Panasonic Toughbook
started by: KB1LQC

Posted by KB1LQC on Aug. 30 2005,11:26

Hello all,
I have an old Panasonic Toughbook (Yeah, it will most likely take a bullet!) that I wanted to runn Linux on but I cannot get it to boot from the CD. IT has about 700 MB in HDD and is a PI 120 MHz with about 32 Megs of RAM. I have windows 98 on it right now(Yeah, about 50 megs of free space left onthe computer lol). AnNy Ideas on how to get it started?

Thanks
KB1LQC

Posted by ke4nt1 on Aug. 30 2005,13:17

FB OM

Does the panasonic HAVE the ability to boot from CDROM ?
If so, check the bios to make sure the CDROM is first in the boot order.

If not, does the Panasonic have a floppy drive?

If so, grab our boot image, use a program called 'winimage' to write it to a floppy.
( winimage can be found for free on the internet )
Set your bios boot order to boot from floppy first,
and have the cd and floppy in their drives when you start the computer.

< http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub....ppy.img >

If you have no floppy drive, then you have to get creative,
but their are still a number of ways to boot DSL other than these two.

Let us know..

73
ke4nt

Posted by davide on Aug. 30 2005,14:46

to be creative can mean, i.e., to extract the hd from your panasonic Toughbook (it not so easy. I've tried myself and it took time. it's not called Toughbook for nothing). then, with an adapter from laptop hd to desktop hd (it can cost from 1 to 5 dollars in ebay, or get it from a friend), you can insert the hd in a desktop pc. then either you resize the win 98 partition and in the free space you can create another partition (doesn't really matter if fat or ext2 partition, the type is not so important in this case) and make a frugall install in it from the live cd (always from the desktop pc). once you finalize the process, put the hd back in the laptop and this should work.
This is what I did, but I did a normal install instead of frugall (but I changed my mind and now I prefer frugall). You may consider freeing space in your win 98 partition, before doing this all, because, even if it's not technically compulsory, it would be very wise to create a swap partition of about the double of you ram (so 64 M) to make your laptop work better.
In any case don't forget to defrag your pc before resizing or creating partitions.
hope this helps:)

Posted by cbagger01 on Aug. 30 2005,16:21

Check out the WIKI information:

< http://damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Boot_Floppies >

Posted by KB1LQC on Aug. 30 2005,18:05

My toughbook has only CD of Floppy and I dont believe the floppy drive really works, at least under windows it just sudenly keeps saying Drive A; could not respond of whatever happens then. How do I check the BIOS to make sure It can boot? And what's the easiest way to install? frugal or the other way. whats frugal anyway?

KB1LQC