Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[bigk101]

I don't Know if This is the proper place for this topic but here goes !...
I have looked at the various topics and cant find a lot about older laptops and using them once again perhaps as a terminal or client . The reason is that most of the laptops I find or that come my way have very small drives and even smaller amounts of ram .I am now working on a junker
with about 8MB of ram and has a corrupted hdd and what seems like a bios with a bad flash . I don't think I will look for a solution that requires a cdrom to install a few files that will get a terminal up with a modem connection .Here is the problem ,and believe me I don't mean to use this site as a personal fix-all for all laptop problems . I thank everyone for your time and knowledge ,and for sharing this forum .I found a COMPAQ
Concerto in distress and decided to have a go at it. The Toshiba drive is 340 MB .It says so on the drive inside ,However the bios claims this is a 38 MB drive and refuses to fdisk and format anything else.I can start the comp and it works perfectly . The lcd screen lights but produces no text.
So I can use it very well with a crt and I'm happy . There is a rockwell modem ,a serial port modem on com2 ,with no cdrom ,I would like to install a modest Puppy with tcpip and perhaps a text browser all from floppy as I have no way to setup networking except serial cables or parrallel port. I need to get cfdisk or linux fdisk and a small kernel all on one floppy or perhaps copy a small image to the 38MB partition to further investigate this units possibilities. PUP001 and CRAMFS files I don't feel will suceed as the size is too great.Please , can you advise a proposal
for this relic, It's really in great shape

[raffy]

freesco (freesco.org) was discussed in this forum and in IRC. you can try it.

[MU]

i would suggest

http://www.toms.net/rb/

http://mulinux.sunsite.dk/

Other than puppy, they are optimized for textmode-usage.

"Grafical" menue using ncurses, "Links" as webbrowser.

Mark

[bigk101]

Thanks for taking the time and helping me ! I will try other apps. or os's
but what I really want to do is get this box up on Puppy . I know it needs more than 38MB disk space but I'm wondering If there is a really tiny version of puppy that someone has created that could be on a floppy ...
something like syslinux to boot and ask for disk2 , that would then have a small kernel from puppy that could be used to set up the modem and format the drive . With no cdrom and only 640 base mem and 07168K extended memory, Is it possible to do such things, I mean create a ramdisk that contains cfdisk and networking to link to a larger Puppy at boot time .also there is no network card only a modem port and serial port
and parallel port.