[wplug] iso small distro

Edward Walter ewalter at tpresence.com
Fri Dec 7 11:50:23 EST 2001


You also might try debian 2.1 with the lowmem disks.  You can find it here:
http://www.debian.org/releases/slink/i386/ch-install-methods.en.html#s-low-m
em-disk
For small distro's I like debian better than the others.  It gets along very
nicely in about 65 Mb of disk space.  I wasn't as memory constrained as you
are, so I used one of the network based install disks and debian 2.2.  All
told, I only had to mess with 2 (I think) floppies.  Clean, simple, easy.
For 2.1 with low memory, it looks like you'll need 4 disks.  After that, you
should be able to apt-get anything else you need.
-Ed

-----Original Message-----
From: wplug-admin at wplug.org [mailto:wplug-admin at wplug.org]On Behalf Of
Rick Smith
Sent: Friday, December 07, 2001 10:53 AM
To: wplug at wplug.org
Subject: Re: [wplug] iso small distro


On Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 07:30:05AM -0800, Elwin Green wrote:
> I have inherited a dinosaur, and want to make it a pet.

Slackware

> The machine is a 386/33 with 4MB RAM, 2 SCSI drives (200 MB each). and a
3.5
> floppy drive (NO CD-ROM). It has Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on it, and
I'd
> like to make it a pure Linux box, for learning purposes.

Slackware

> I've been looking for a small distro, but most of the ones I've found
> require 8MB RAM, because they use ramdisks. Others either don't support
> SCSI, or require a CD-ROM. I did find one - Martin's Mandrake 6 - which I
> got up and running, but I couldn't find a text editor there (if anyone has
> used it, did I overlook something?).

Slackware

> Can anyone recommend a distro that I can download to floppy and install to
> hard drive, that supports SCSI, and that will work and play with 4MB RAM?
(X
> Windows neither necessary nor desired)

Slackware

ftp ftp.slackware.org
cd pub/mirrors/slackware/slackware-3.3 (or 3.4 or newer.  I listed
oldest there)

root around.  Old distributions such as slackare were cut up to
have chunks which could fit on floppies.  Look at (in the above
area) slakware/x2 for example:

-r--rw-r--   1 volkerdi slackware      665 Sep 25  1997 diskx2
-r--rw-r--   1 volkerdi slackware   724848 Sep 25  1997 x3318514.tgz
-r--rw-r--   1 volkerdi slackware   333935 Jun 10  1997 x331cfg.tgz
-r--rw-r--   1 volkerdi slackware   265200 Sep 25  1997 x331doc.tgz

Funny permissions, but it means the whole directory can fit on a floppy.
It's organized to get a system going with a subset of floppies.  Like
since you don't need X isn't a big deal, you wouldn't take the x* stuff.

Is this the type of pointer you were looking for?  Or something
else/more?

-- Rick
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