[NTLUG:Discuss] Breathing life into a really ancient laptop.

[David Stanaway]

On Tue, 2004-02-10 at 23:44, Kelledin wrote:
> On Tuesday 10 February 2004 11:27 pm, Steve Baker wrote:
> > The huge problem is that it's running Windows 3.1 - and that
> > simply won't do...but installing Linux on it is something of a
> > challenge because it's external floppy drive has 'died'.  That
> > (and the fact that the battery is shot) was the reason it was
> > consigned to the back of the closet in the first place.  The
> > external floppy has some really weird Compaq-specific
> > interface and I can't get a replacement. It doesn't have a
> > CD-ROM drive or any kind of network interface.
> 
> Well, you could try hooking up a parallel-port ("backpack") 
> CD-ROM.  Also, you might try just cracking open the case and 
> temporarily removing the drive.  If it's a standard 2.5" laptop 
> IDE drive (power and data pins all going through a single IDC 
> connector), it should be possible for you to get an inexpensive 
> adapter to hook it up to a standard desktop IDE connector.  It 
> may take some creative rearrangement of drives in the desktop, 
> but it's perfectly possible to make the drive 
> standalone-bootable before transplanting it back into the 
> laptop.

This is the path I would go down. And then the memory limitation gets
lessened also, as mostly, the memory limitation is for the installer.

Once you have the base install setup, you can turn off unnecesary
services etc, and maybe use a smaller shell than bash, and reducing the
number of virtual terminals spawned by init.

You sould be able to setup pretty much any distro on the disk, and you
should be able to take a disk image of the original so you could go back
to your original windows install if need be.

You will probably want to build a custom kernel for the box with
anything you don't need taken out so you can reduce the kernel size.  I
am not sure if you would be better with a 2.2, 2.4 or 2.6 series kernel
either.

-- 
David Stanaway <david at stanaway.net>