[ale] Getting Linux on an old laptop with only floppy drive and 100 MB Iomega zip drive

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Tue 2008-01-29 12:05:49 -0500, Rev. Johnny Healey wrote:

> The debian "business card" iso is only 32MB.  You could boot from a
> floppy, mount the iso image from a zip disk, and proceed from there.

This is definitely the way to go, though you won't get a gui or any
significant tools from the business card without an active network.

debian has instructions about it here:

  http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch05s01.html.en#floppy-boot

As far as breaking large files across small media, read split(1).  For
reassembling fragmented files, just use cat.

For example:

user at realmachine$ split -b100000000 foo.iso foo
user at realmachine$ cp fooaa /media/zipdisk/

  ... transfer zipdisk from realmachine to tiny  ...

user at tiny$ cat /media/zipdisk/fooaa >>foo.iso

  ... etc..

I concur with the general sentiment here that a laptop of that vintage
isn't going to like the big flashy modern distros, and probably isn't
worth trying.  How much RAM are we talking?

  --dkg
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