[lug] Installation Guidance Needed

[Nate Duehr]

Hi Charlie,

If you have another machine that you use daily and this one is another
machine to load Linux on, most distributions support booting from floppy
just far enough into the boot process to then read the rest of the
installation files from CD-ROM.  You can pretty easily make a set of
bootable floppies for almost all of the popular types of Linux to do this,
and some used to include the boot floppy in the boxed version.   (The floppy
image is usually in an "images" directory on the CD-ROM if you have another
computer you can use to look through it.)

If you're having trouble, I'd bet a number of people on the mailing list
here could bring along a floppy and CD appropriate for each other to a LUG
meeting.

I have a number of old machines doing various duty.  You will find that
they'll run Linux just fine (maybe a bit slowly) but if you try to use X
(the windowed user interface that's graphical) on them they're going to be
painfully slow.  Of course, slow is always relative... if you have lots of
time on your hands and don't mind waiting for windows to draw themselves on
the screen and you're just learning -- it may not be a problem for you.

Mandrake used to be a distribution specifically designed for Pentium and
higher systems -- originally it was built off of RedHat Linux, but is now
its own entity.  I don't know if they ever decided to support machines
slower than Pentium, and it may refuse to load.  You may want to use RedHat,
SuSE, Debian, or one of the slightly more "mainstream" (Mandrake's
definitely mainstream, but their heritage is faster-than-486 machines...)
distributions to learn with on that 486.

All the best,
Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Charlie Rose" <ros5e at ISAaC.com>
To: <lug at lug.boulder.co.us>
Sent: Monday, March 31, 2003 7:59 PM
Subject: [lug] Installation Guidance Needed


> Gentlefolk!
>
> I'm brand new to Linux, and need some hand holding. I want to install
> Mandrake Linux 9.0 on an old 50 MHz 486 machine I have (I'll move it up to
> a better machine when I'm able). The hard-drive on this computer is kaput,
> so I'm going to replace it with an unformatted, unpartitioned disk I
picked
> up on the cheap.
>
> I figure I'll install the hard drive, configure the BIOS for it, run FDISK
> (from a bootable Windows 98 floppy I have), and then format it. But the
Big
> Question is: What do I do then? How can I get the computer to look at the
> CD, and how do I get the installation started when there isn't already an
> OS of some kind on the hard drive that will let me get to the CD?
>
> With much appreciation ....
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------
> Charlie Rose               FAX: 303-545-6674
> Innovative Scientific Analysis and Computing
> P.O. Box 1636, Boulder, Colorado, 80306-1636
>
> Web Site:                  <http://www.ISAaC.com>
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>
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