Linux Laptop w/ 3.5" Disk, USB, and No Hard Drive?

ryewell asks: "I have an IBM Thinkpad 390 Laptop, PII 266Mhz, 128 MB RAM, with USB 1.0 port and a 3.5 floppy drive being the most important stats I would assume for this question. So my hard drive died, and I've been using a DOS boot disk and a program called Mel to do my word processing.Would it be possible to boot the laptop in Linux using a 3.5 disk, then using drivers access the USB memory stick that had an adequate Linux system on it?" With USB thumb drives getting to be as large as 512 megs, memory sticks weighing in at 1 gig, and Compact Flash cards getting into the 2 gig range, this might not be such a bad idea. There's the Linux Mobile System that looks to implement something like this, but are there other distributions or similar projects that might be of interest? If you were going to put together a custom system for something like this, how would you do it? "If Linux can be configured this way, I would need no hard drive, and the created docs/info could be saved on the USB drive memory stick. This way, no hard drive means no moving parts, which means better battery life, and I won't have to buy a hard drive which at the best deal I can find is about $130 US after taxes, shipping, etc. And how cool would it be to run a laptop off of a memory stick! Unfortunately, I know nothing about Linux, but this might be a cool problem to solve for those smart and knowledgeable enough to figure it out. Thanks for any help you can provide!"

Comments

I would not use MemoryStick

[YankeeInExile]

I would use a CF card and ATA adapter.

I would also keep in mind that write times for CF devices can be ...g...l...a...c...i...a...l compared to disk.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Anonymous Coward]

You could try using a Windows Boot CD...

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Amiga Lover]

I have a solution that's faster, relatively quiet, standard, works with many operating systems, is easy to find and not a difficult process to implement.

I'd replace the dead HD for about $15.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Smallpond]

Look into a flash file system to minimize writes to flash and to deal with inevitable bad blocks.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[AndroidCat]

If he's going for strangest boot, how about using an iPod to hold the FS?

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Anonymous Coward]

CF cards have limited numbers of erase/write cycles (usually about 300,000), so using it with swap files and other frequently written applications would be inadvisable, unless the user is planning on boosting the amount of RAM and/or turning off swap.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[DunbarTheInept]

Or a digital camera with a USB interface.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[hoggoth]

> I'd replace the dead HD for about $15

Reading, not your strong point.
From the article:
"I won't have to buy a hard drive which at the best deal I can find is about $130 US"

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[SquadBoy]

I hate to admit cause it makes me look like a dork but I've installed Debian off of my CoolPix. :)

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Dav3K]

If ever I saw a post worthy of mod-points, yours was it.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[stevenbdjr]

Searching for a deal, not the posters strong point.

I just recently bought a new 20GB laptop drive, 5400rpm, for $80. If you look on eBay, you can find them in the 2 - 4GB range for around $15 - $30.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Richard_at_work]

Depends how much space he wants, i have a spare 2GB (or 4GB, cant remember) 2.5" hard disk going spare atm. Yes, new ones are going to set you back $130 (for 30GB i bet) but since hes looking at much lower capacities in his 'alternative' method of operation, why would he turn his nose up at 2gb second hand.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but this is a pretty old laptop. Perhaps compatable hard drives are hard to find for it.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Amiga Lover]

> I'd replace the dead HD for about $15

Reading, not your strong point.
From the article:
"I won't have to buy a hard drive which at the best deal I can find is about $130 US"

The article submitter's laziness in finding cheap HDs does not mean I cannot find them

Thus my original solution is still the same, and is one I implemented barely a year ago myself.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading, not your strong point.

Resourcefulness not your strong point. Pick up a couple of spare broken laptops on eBay and use their drives.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Pharmboy]

"I won't have to buy a hard drive which at the best deal I can find is about $130 US"

I just searched eBay, 680 listings in laptop hard drives, with buy it now for $20 for a 1 gig ibm. That took me an entire 20 seconds to do. I'm guessing he didn't look very hard.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[JJahn]

Depending on how "recently" that was, you got ripped off. I just (6/23/2004) bought a 40GB 5400 rpm laptop drive for $89 total, from newegg.com. Its a Samsung drive and quite quiet if anyone wants one. Item Number N82E16822152501.

Honestly, I'd have to recommend to just buy a new hard drive with how cheap they are these days.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[VertigoAce]

Consider JFFS2 as a possible alternative to JFFS. JFFS2 supports transparent compression,so you get more use out of your space.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[thebes]

You can pick up used 2-4 GB hard drives for like, $10-15 at your local computer store. Considering the state of the laptop, anything used that was bought would probably last longer as well.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[big daddy kane]

and useing a CF deciece as a hard drive is a b...a...d... idea, after so many writes the media starts to degrade, and if you're using it as a hard drive it wont take all that long.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Anonymous Coward]

C'mon...

This guy is a dumbfucker if he can't find a laptop drive less than $130.

5 seconds of googling, froogling, pricewatching, etc etc would have revlealed mutiple sources of fairly large hard drives that are larger and faster than any CF or USB stick is going to be, without the cost and disadvanteges of flash memory, and that will actually hold a Linux distro without shelling out may more hundreds OR THOUSANDS.

Mr. Submitter, you're too fucking lazy (and tight-assed)!!!!!!

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, look on ebay....sheesh 2-4 gig notebook hdds can be had for anywhere from $5 - $30. This is simply over thinking a situation.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[orangesquid]

http://www.cmsproducts.com/detail.aspx?ID=318

Does that look like a standard hard drive? I can't really tell.

I know some older ThinkPads require special drives. Perhaps this is one of them?

Of course, this might just be a special caddy, in which case, if his old caddy is undamaged, it is probably possible to transfer it to a new drive.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Anonymous Coward]

And set the noatime option on all the filesystems, to avoid a write every time the drive is accessed.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[cbreaker]

That Thinkpad should work find with a standard size low profile notebook HD.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[per11]

The dead drive in the laptop is probably smaller than 2GB. Therefore, it could be $15 to replace it.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:
"I won't have to buy a hard drive which at the best deal I can find is about $130 US"

Fair enough, if that's the only reason that you'd want to not use a HD, because you can't be fucked looking around at the hundreds of places you can find a HD cheaper than that, then perhaps you deserve to try doing a clunky workaround solution.

The rest of us will google for under a minute and find cheap HDs.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, but he also mentioned about battery life

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[NanoGator]

"The article submitter's laziness in finding cheap HDs does not mean I cannot find them"

Guess you missed this bit:

"This way, no hard drive means no moving parts, which means better battery life,"

For what he wants, your solution is half-assed at best. You certainly had no right to be rude about it.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[croddy]

well, surely he might get more *minutes* of battery life, but I can't imagine him being as *productive* while waiting for his programs to load, memory pages to swap, and files to save ... all over a blistering USB 1.1 bus to a screamin' compactflash disk.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[zonker]

also keeping in mind the limited number of rewrites that flash memory has. it is amazingly high, but if you are using it day in day out you might hit the threshold...

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[PW2]

Do USB drives have the same problem?

It's the fourth time I typed in that question... Slashdot keeps complaining about me typing too fast (<20 seconds) (The fourth time, I made it all the way to 19 seconds) :(

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Vilim]

If you are going to use CF cards you have to make sure that you _DO NOT_ swap to it, CF, SD and company only have a finite number of writes to them. If it is an old laptop it will be swapping alot and your CF card will fry in a matter of weeks

I know of disasterous results where people have decided to swap to a memory card

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[RevAaron]

Indeed... Especially on a PC laptop that old. It probably gets about 25 minutes of battery life as it is. The boost to 28 isn't going to make that much of a difference.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[RevAaron]

Yes. It's an issue with current Flash technology; a USB drive, CF, SD or MemoryStick card will all have the same problem. You can get flash chips with longer lifes, but unless he's spending mucho buckos, they'll all be about in the same area.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[furchin]

The problem is the submitter wants to replace whatever hard drive has died on him with one of similar capacity. There's no doubt that the drive would cost him $130. However, he wants to know how he can make use of a 1-gig (or less!) USB drive -- thus completely ignoring the fact that he can, indeed, replace the drive with a $15 model which should have 2-4 gigabytes of space. After all, it obviously doesn't matter to him to have a smaller amount of disk space.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[mp3phish]

Well...

Since CF Cards are pin compatible with IDE hard drives, and CF cards are currently the most durable (and cheapest) flash memory (even below USB Memory) I would put a CF card in the hard drive slot of the laptop...

The only problem is that flash memory is no good at writing (very slow) and so turn off swap and try to minimize writes to the disk (ie, don't run too many cron's etc..)

I think it is a waste of time and money to try to boot off floppy, and then load a system off a USB flash drive or CF card, because even with a 1GIG USB drive (or CF card) you will be paying about the same as a low end brand new hard drive for your laptop, and have very very slow performance, no swap, and limited life (600,000 writes per sector or something for flash memory is what i read somewhere)

So your salvage operation as you describe it sounds like it is going to cost you more, and give less performance, than a brand new hard drive with 1yr warranty slapped into there. Pricewatch has some new ones for pretty cheap. Even newegg.com has them for less than 100$ (and the cheapest 1GIG usb memory stick i have found is about 130$)

Your idea sounds good, and similar ideas have been done before in the linux firmware hacked routers.. where there is a very small amount of flash memory onboard but using a USB memory stick to load the rest of the system. But in your case, this isn't practical because its cheaper to go with a hard drive than a flash stick.

my 2c

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[shadowbearer]

Indeed. I picked up a junk laptop from someone local here - in a town of 10k people - for $20; and while the screen was shot and it wouldn't boot, the hard drive was good (a 8GB Fuji) - and the important thing was that I asked questions about how it died (was dropped) and insisted on looking at it in person first. (also got two sticks of working 64mb mem out of it)

A poster above mentioned Ebay, and he's right - you don't know what you are getting. From my experiences I figure it's about 50/50 in getting a HD that will have some lifetime left on it (and there's the weird ones, like a 6GB IBM laptop drive I have that has noisy bearing but has lasted almost two years now - for $25+shp) but in general you are getting pulls that were past their considered lifetime and have problems they don't or won't mention.

In most cities however, I think it's better to ask around or put an ad in the local webmart that you will consider buying throwaways if you can look at them first. It's amazing what some people throw away because they don't want to pay the repair costs. Just make sure you know what you are looking at (and listening to :)

SB

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[pyrrhonist]

I hate to admit cause it makes me look like a dork but I've installed Debian off of my CoolPix. :)

Installing Debian never made anyone look like a dork.

What? Installing off the camera!?!

Oh, I get it. Nevermind.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Halfbaked Plan]

Depends. My 'old' PC laptop is an HP Omnibook 300. The machine with Windows 3, Word, and Excel in a ROM card. I replaced the PCMCIA hard drive awhile back with an 80 meg SanDisk Flash card.

It runs for hours and hours on four AA penlight batteries.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Anonymous Coward]

if you can't find a hard drive for less than $130, then reading the results of a Google/whatever search is not your strong point. for example, PC Liquidator has a 810MB Laptop Hard Drive (12mm) for all of $12.99. while it may be for a seemingly archaic drive, the unit is dirt cheap and much more practical than a CF solution, and it isn't hard to find larger capacity drives if you actually look (ie. I also a 4 gig UDMA laptop drive for less than $40, but I leave it to you to figure out how to do your own search).

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[saskboy]

Or perhaps his eBay account is suspended for not paying $130US for 3 purchases, after he realized he was paying way too much, and now he can't bid anymore.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[RevAaron]

Pfffft. The old Omnibooks are an exception, something special. Sure, my old Newton with a keyboard- basically an old laptop- lasted for a long time, but it was something quite different from your average old PC lappy.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[vsprintf]

When using "thumb drives", USB drives, or whatever you want to call them, the entry in fstab should contain *-noatime*. Otherwise every time you read the *drive*, you also write to the *drive* and reduce the flash device's life by one write.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[nihilogos]

I'd replace the dead HD for about $15.

It's a laptop, dufus.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[WuphonsReach]

"I won't have to buy a hard drive which at the best deal I can find is about $130 US"

Which is silly of the submitter because if you simply go and look at PriceScan.com and search for Notebook Hard Drives, 20GB notebook hard drives are only $70. Which is a far cry from $130 and a heck of a lot cheaper then any flash-based media is going to be.

Not to mention that the submitter is being lazy and not looking on Ebay or one of the online auction sites.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[VivianC]

The old Thinkpads use standard 2.5 inch hard driver, but require a special caddy. If you still have the broken hard drive, you still have the required caddy.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Mage Powers]

pin compatible? CF has 50 tiny holes (female) while laptop ide is 44 small pins (male)
I suspect he doesn't want a new HD because it'd be too new for it, at least thats the problem i'm running into but I've got a 486 laptop with 800mb thats starting to go...

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[JohnwheeleR]

Dude,

quit trying to be cool. get a new fucking laptop already...

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Anonymous Coward]

I've recently bought BRAND NEW hard disks which were Dead On Arrival- clicking, no access- on first powerup.

I've bought some on Ebay which have been perfect for over a year. (and 1 which died: SMART warned, I procrastinated...)

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Magic5Ball]

This sub-thread assumes the individual seeking the drive lives near the US/UK/Asia where old computer junk are plentiful and easy to buy. How many eBay auctions will ship to the Southern Hemisphere for cheap?

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[ottothecow]

google for mulinux.

Its designed to be run completely from floppys if needed (boot with one and make a ramdisk then add anything extra with more floppies) but it is also installed to the disk with a simple command. I would assume that it would work with a CF card in an ATA adapter (for the PCMCIA slot)

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Anonymous Coward]

I also agree.. Most mom-pop computer stores have older and used hard drives floating round for dirt. and I can find new drives all over the net for less than $60.00.

this is an example of darwinism but in PC users...

the lazy laptop owner that can not scrounge for themselves is doomed to a meager existance that will slowly kill him while the resourceful PC user can forrage for his needs and will continue unhampered.

I usually ignore morons that say "I cant find...." about common items that are easily found. Let them flounder and die. it makes the gene pool better.

(and the dolt is a Michael friend... how else did the question get posted?)

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[kunudo]

Check out PRAMFS

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[mp3phish]

Yes. Pin compatible.

You just need a straight through adapter and some pins go unused.

Probably Knoppix

[mj01nir]

I run my hacked IA-1 appliance from 16MB Compact Flash using Midori Linux. Sadly, I think the distro is dead now.

Your best bet is to try Knoppix, assuming you have a CD-ROM.

Re:Probably Knoppix

[drinkypoo]

There's another distribution for iOpener that i keep meaning to try called jailbait linux. I am also using Midori (actually, M4I) but I think it sucks for my purposes. ssh 1, crappy old version of the X server, et cetera.

My plan is to come up with a boot image that will spit out only busybox, the stuff I absolutely need, do DHCP configuration (probably in the kernel) and contact an X server via XDMCP. But then, I don't want to use it for a computer, just an X terminal.

Re:Probably Knoppix

[rjamestaylor]

assuming you have a CD-ROM.

Don't assume -- I think the omission of a CD-ROM was intentional, unless the poor guy had not heard of a Live CD yet... But it is hard to imagine a PII with a USB but no CD-ROM.

So, assuming the poor guy doesn't have a CD-ROM I'd suggest getting a USB Hard Drive. Don't tell me that speed is an issue; this is a floppy-based PII 266 laptop...Or, at least, a parallel port CD-ROM.

Put the USB key fob in the other USB port.

Re:Probably Knoppix

[Curtman]

Isn't LTSP exactly what you want then? I remember reading a lot of discussion about the iOpener on the mailing list when they first came out.

Re:Probably Knoppix

[prockcore]

There's another distribution for iOpener that i keep meaning to try called jailbait linux.

I helped put together Jailbait. It's a nice distro, although a little out-dated (uses a test 2.4 kernel). I still have it installed on one of my iOpeners.

It has netscape 4, apache, ssh and mp321. It uses blackbox for WM and busybox for the apps.

It would definitely work as a test distro, and it will fit on even the smallest thumbdrives (it weighs in at 16 megs).

Re:Probably Knoppix

[Anonymous Coward]

Run it as a terminal. It's incredibly simple, the KNoppix terminal server even has a GUI for crying out loud. 128 Megs of RAM will give you a stylin' terminal. Use rom-o-matic to make a floppy boot image and then after you boot save your configs to a flash device using the save configs GUI in knoppix if you don't want to configure your own script. Then when you're ready to reboot, at the prompt after you hit the terminal server boot with

knoppix myconfig=/dev/sda1

That will take all your settings and desktop files off the USB flash device.
For work files, just store them on a remote samba share. I use something like this for several PCs around the house, the scarry thing is the terminals run faster than hard drive installations.

I LOVE GOOGLE.

[sekzscripting]

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

Re:I LOVE GOOGLE.

[Edward Teach]

Too bad you don't know enough about HTML to make a link... www.toms.net/rb/

Re:I LOVE GOOGLE.

[Anonymous Coward]

edward teach... the gentleman pirate. hah.

Re:I LOVE GOOGLE.

[solferino]

Not only do I love google, I love clickable hyperlinks as well.

tomsrtbt

Re:I LOVE GOOGLE.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't even need to do that anymore! Firefox has a "Plain text links" extension -- just select the text, right click, choose "open selected url in a new tab". Opera also sports such a feature, if I'm not mistaken.

Spiffy.

Re:I LOVE GOOGLE.

[joshmccormack]

tomsrtbt is really meant for recovery, or to boot in to get an install going or something. I don't think you'd want to live in that environment. I think the dude is looking for something maybe like this that would boot up stuff on another media.

And tomsrtbt isn't buried too deeply. I think you could probably find it with just about any search engine, not to defame Google.

Small Linux

[homeobocks]

Small Linux should have everything you need, on two floppies, to mount a USB filesystem. If not, it is simply the matter of compiling a kernel and sticking it on one of the floppies. Good luck with your project!

Re:Small Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

That's just not enough! For all your swearing and tiny linux needs, try Damn Small Linux

Re:Small Linux

[shadowbearer]

DSL, while great (and I always have a copy handy) won't do USB boot as far as I am aware. The floppy boot disk doesn't have USB drivers on it - only HD and CDrom (which work fantastic if just have the image on a drive somewhere).

Now it'd be neat if someone would write a floppy that had USB drivers and could boot the DSL image (50mb and very usable) off of a memory stick. I can't see any reason why it couldn't be done , tho it might take two floppies, one for the (stripped down) kernel, one for the root system load - or maybe only one? Anyone care to tackle that question? I've never attempted a USB boot floppy system myself.

SB

good point

[grahagre]

that would be reletively easy to set up a linux system like that, i'd think the hardest thing would be to (or pain in the ass) would be to configure a dos boot disk to execute the loadlin.exe at startup in autoexec.bat. does anyone know of any bios that lets you boot off a usb storage device?

Re:good point

[josepha48]

I'd actually do a Linux boot disk, there are several Linux 1 floppy distros around, and even howto's on the subject, at tldp.org.

In most cases it is easier to do if you already have a linux box to work with.

A really good place to start with would be http://www.8ung.at/spblinux/

Apparently this guy is using XDirectFB and a couple of floppies and you can have a full X running to surf the web. He has a USB versino somewhere on the site. In fact check out his usbboot setup.

Re:good point

[BACbKA]

All modern BIOSes do. Some vendors allow you BIOS firmware upgrades to modern versions, which would help you to boot directly off the USB drive.

Why Bother?

[Virtucon]

266MHZ? The time it would take you to get it
on the USB, dowload the software, configure it it would be a waste of time and money.

Figure labor as your biggest cost. Nobody's time is free. You can get a decent Laptop for less money. Put the laptop on the driveway and drive over it.

I've had three laptops in the past four years, the last two I owned aren't even good enough for my kids anymore.

Re:Why Bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

266 MHz isn't good enough for word processing and a few kid's games? What do you do with your laptop exactly? Are you doing DNA alignments on whole genomes? Solving deep astrophysics problems? Modeling global climate change?

Sheesh, it must be nice to have such high standards.

Re:Why Bother?

[hdw]

I've got some 233MHz laptops that works just like wonder.
One is dead silent, always on, network monitor (running tkined/scotty).
Another is my SMS/Voice gateway.
A third (which is actually a P90) is my wireless Mud client.

So don't say that slow old laptops are useless, just because you can't play the lastest games on 'em.
//hdw

Re:Why Bother?

[BACbKA]

Put the laptop on the driveway and drive over it.

This is a strange suggestion in a post that advocates cost-saving measures, isn't it? The same laptop can easily be used as a diskless machine booted off the home network, mounting all it needs off the NFS.

Re:Why Bother?

[WindBourne]

For something like longhorn or XP or a full linux distro, I would agree with you, but I do have a stripped Mandrake on a 266 with 128 MHz. I would not run an action game on it, but for simple DE, it is not bad.

To be honest, I would rather use it for none graphical applications (web server, dns, etc).

Re:Why Bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Thinkpad he mentions is a workhorse. I have one, with the HD working of course. I runs Linux well. Whatever time he invests is worth it. Now if it was an old Pentium I, or 486, I might agree with you. Linux runs well on PII's.

Re:Why Bother?

[kfg]

Nobody's time is free.

You don't know me very well, do you?

You can get a decent Laptop for less money. Put the laptop on the driveway and drive over it.

Assuming you spend that time at some job being recompensed, yeah, I guess. If you spend it at home watching Farscape reruns. . .ummmmmmm, no.

I've had three laptops in the past four years, the last two I owned aren't even good enough for my kids anymore.

Ahhhhh, a dream cusotmer, step right this way sir, the web is waiting, and I don't mean the "World Wide."

My ten year old 486 laptop still does serious work, often booting off of a single floppy Linux distro, Mu Linux, which this gentleman could also use, install on his HD and rebuild a system from there, all while watching TV at no out of pocket expense.

Time may not be free, but a good deal of it goes unpaid anyway, unless you care to recompense me for taking out my own trash and watching Farscape?

KFG

Re:Why Bother?

[Fizzl]

I've been using a DOS boot disk and a program called Mel to do my word processing.

And you suggest trashing his adequate-for-the-purpose machine and buying a top-of-the-line power hog would be saving in some sense.

On the topic of what time costs. I consider my free time absolutely worthless. I waste it on drinking, reading slashdot or watching cartoons anyway. I would find a nice hardware hacking project much more better value for my time than my usual activities.

I made Linux 2.2 (with some basic software) run on 25mhz 486dx with 8 megs of memory just for the challenge of it. Learned hell of a lot of how Linux works in the process too. I say, to the original author: Go for it!
#linux on IRCNet is very helpfull if you show atleast moderate experience so they can actually instruct you without teaching how to use an editor first.

I wonder what this post cost me. Took many minutes to proof read it, and actually check the specs of the old beast in the closet.

Re:Why Bother?

[jemenake]

266MHZ? The time it would take you to get it on the USB, dowload the software, configure it it would be a waste of time and money. Figure labor as your biggest cost. Nobody's time is free. You can get a decent Laptop for less money. Put the laptop on the driveway and drive over it.

I agree completely. I just *sold* a 266MHz Thinkpad 365 with 500MB drive, external floppy and internal CD on ebay for FOURTY DOLLARS! So, for the cost of gassing up a SUV in California, you could already be well ahead of where you are now.

Now, if you're going through all of this just for bragging rights... to be able to say that you have installed Linux on a doorstop, then okay. But let's just all agree that that's the point. But if your goal is to have a usable Linux system without shelling out a bunch of cash... then a mere $100 would get you a laptop which would put your current one to shame, so it wouldn't be worth wasting your time with the one you've got.

Re:Why Bother?

[pla]

Figure labor as your biggest cost. Nobody's time is free. You can get a decent Laptop for less money.

At my contracting rate, my "time" equals over $100/hr.

However, that assumes a non-stop stream of work at that rate, which does not hold true. In the current economy, I barely make it (even accepting much lower hourly rates for non-corporate clients, so not just because I won't take less).

So... Sure, if it takes me four hours to set up a laptop, in theory, it has cost me more than to buy a used low-end modern laptop. In practice, I simply don't have $400 to blow on a new laptop just to save myself four hours of work (during which I would otherwise have played some stupid game, or watched a movie, or some other non-income-generating activity).

I suspect this applies to many of us (although many may have neither free time nor the spare cash), making the FP's question a perfectly valid one... How to stretch the useful life of older hardware?


Actually, though, I also consider this a really interesting question from the battery life POV, as well. Even for those of us with perfectly good high-end laptops, might we manage to double the battery life by running the actual OS from CF or a USB stick, and setting the HDD itself to spin down after only a few seconds of non-use? I'd like to see some numbers (and may even waste a few hours to answer the question myself), but this could have a lot of potential.


I've had three laptops in the past four years, the last two I owned aren't even good enough for my kids anymore.

...No offense, but you might want to lower your standards a tad. I still use an 8YO laptop, and it does everything I need it to - Mindless timewasting games (solitare, minesweeper, sokoban, etc); writing small code snippets; email and word processing; browsing the web (no Flash or Java or the like, but for plain HTML, it doesn't take noticeably longer than my far more powerful desktop); moving files from point A to point B without needing to burn a DVD; listening to music while on the road or just away from my main PC.

Basically, with the exception of gaming or the rare CPU intensive task, no PC needs more than a PII/300 (the above-mentioned 8YO laptop has an original Pentium as its CPU). We demand more because our desktops have gotten us used to far more power for very little money. But, if you stop to evaluate why you have a laptop in the first place, you'd probably find that you don't need a 3GHz machine to help you pass the time for the morning commute.

Re:Why Bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well odds are most computers won't be good enough for kids. In my experience, it's the kids who're whining that their game of UT2k4 or whatever is only running at a paltry 30fps. Hell. I want reliable, I use my briefcase-size lightweight manual typewriter Just scan and OCR the material in while you make coffee. Fast, easy, cheap, works as long as you have coffee to power the user. (Which on a side note- my budget 300$ desktop can run every single thing I've thrown at it including the travesty Deus Ex 2...at 7fps. Playable, more or less.)

Re:Why Bother?

[damiangerous]

Put the laptop on the driveway and drive over it.

WTF?! I was laid off six months ago, and I haven't found work yet, so as you can imagine money is extremely tight. I don't have a laptop, and I certainly can't afford one, but I'd still love to have something that would let me hang out in the bedroom with my wife and play with Python scripts while watching TV. Before you drive over another older laptop, let me know, I may be within driving distance to come take it off your hands and give it a good home. You seem to have a very different idea of "good enough" than I do.

Re:Why Bother?

[rworne]

Sorry to say, $40 will manage to fill up an empty '98 Toyota Camry (or a recent model Highlander) with 18.1 gallons of 87 Octane here in California. I'd hate to see what an SUV would cost with 30+ gallon tanks.

Re:Why Bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually logged in just to see if I had any mod points for you (sadly no). The original poster seems just a bit spoiled.

Re:Why Bother?

[networkBoy]

OT: but hey,
My pickup costs $63+ to fill up it's tank.
'94 Chevy, C1500
-nB

Re:Why Bother?

[mark_lybarger]

so you're the reason i have to pay so much in taxes, eh? get off yer lazy arse and start chipping in like the rest of us working bastards.

and they say the education sytem is failing...

Re:Why Bother?

[Halfbaked Plan]

I filled my car up at 1.609 a gallon last week. Semi-rural 'flyover country' living is great.

Re:Why Bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that Linux, just like Windows, has become such a resource hog. I remember when I ran RedHat 5 on a 486 25mhz with 12 megs o RAM, with X, Gimp, and a few other nifty things. Now I can barely get anything beyond a shell to run on a 450. Talk a double standard.

Re:Why Bother?

[damiangerous]

Ah well, thanks for looking out for me anyway.

Re:Why Bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

Proof read??? You are surely the only one who does that here.

Re:Why Bother?

[SpooForBrains]

It's highly unlikely that the machine in question will have a network boot ROM. So to do this it couldn't be "diskless"

Re:Why Bother?

[chegosaurus]

Whoah, for a moment there I thought you said you were in the bedroom, with your wife, and you wanted to *play with Python scripts*!

Re:Why Bother?

[BACbKA]

I was talking about using a tiny USB drive (RO) or a
RO diskette to do the netboot.

Re:Why Bother?

[Wakko Warner]

Spoiled?

He's a realist, at worst. The original poster wants to do something extremely stupid -- so stupid, in fact, that I feel this entire article may be a cleverly-disguised troll. The commentor was simply pointing out the futility of the whole exercise. Sure, you can boot off a floppy and start running Linux off a USB storage device, but exactly what is the fucking point? In the end, you've taken an old, slow laptop and managed to make it unbearably slow by moving mass storage to the slowest port on the machine other than /dev/ttyA.

- A.P.

Re:Why Bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

I blame Gnome and KDE, and the "toolkits" that go with them. All the underlying crap that is used by these monsters, and how ubiquitous it is becoming in common apps is the problem. I imagine it would still be quite snappy if you used apps that basically just depended on Xlib, or at worst motif. It's ridiculous that you need 30 libraries to compile an app, and 25 of them are just to support one of the other libraries that the app really depends on.

It's these stupid DEs that have hundreds of dependencies that are the problem. Whatever happened to keeping it simple?

(By the way, Linux still works fine with just the command line on almost any system. I got Slackware of at least version 7 (maybe newer) on a 486SX with 3 megs of ram and a 120 meg drive.)

quit being a cheap bastard

[kmcmartin]

and buy a new bloody hard disk. it would be far cheaper to buy a new laptop hard disk, than a 512M of usb storage. christ.

Re:quit being a cheap bastard

[Cecil]

perhaps he already has a USB drive.

Besides, people like you who aren't interested in doing something geeky simply because it's possible really need not bother commenting on stories like this. It would make everyone's life a little more pleasant.

Re:quit being a cheap bastard

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The USB on it is probably the 12mbps one too. That is dirt slow, to say nothing of the "thumb" drive speed.

IIRC, Compact Flash cards are pretty slow too. I suspect that for less than the price of a 1GB or 2GB CF card one can buy a replacement laptop drive cheaply on eBay.

Re:quit being a cheap bastard

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe he already has a thumbdrive lined up

Re:quit being a cheap bastard

[Kjella]

a) Maybe he has one
b) Maybe he'd like to use that Linux/USB combo elsewhere
c) Maybe he just likes to try a geeky project

I'd be kinda cool if you could have your system everywhere with a floppy and an USB key (much more typical than USB boot, at least).

Kjella

Re:quit being a cheap bastard

[91degrees]

The USB on it is probably the 12mbps one too. That is dirt slow, to say nothing of the "thumb" drive speed.

Depends what you want it for though. It could be fast enough if you don't have a lot o fstuff to load.

Re:quit being a cheap bastard

[kmcmartin]

funny. knoppix does just that, and doesn't rely on crappy floppy drives.

Re:quit being a cheap bastard

[HeghmoH]

The original post seems to place a high priority on "I want my portable to be useful" and only a small afterthought on "oh yeah, that would be cool, too!" In that case, pointing out the most practical way to achieve his goals is relevant.

Re:quit being a cheap bastard

[taniwha]

I swapped out a dead drive twice on my last laptop (a Dell) - it's not hard at all - for one of the age you have you might need to play with BIOS stuff to get the device geometry correct - but it's certainly worth doing if the rest of the lap top's OK and you're happy with tyhe speed

Re:quit being a cheap bastard

[caswelmo]

Wouldn't it be kind of neat if you could just plug in your USB key from your keychain into any public (or private) terminal and be off & running with your own OS & all of your own customized settings, files, etc. Maybe you could even use your handheld as the "brains" of the operation.

Re:quit being a cheap bastard

[Anonymous Coward]

If that is the case...

Then perhaps we should intoduce him to google where he can type in "linux usb flash drive" and find all of the sites that carry linux that runs from a flash drive with instructions on how to do it.

Damn, it seems like "Ask Slashdot" has become "I'm too stupid or lazy to do some basic fucking research"

Re:quit being a cheap bastard

[Dashing Leech]

Not only would it be neat, it would be useful for some of us. I have a work laptop that I take home with me regularly. Unfortunately, we aren't allowed to install anything ourselves. Security is set so tight on them some of us can't even change our timezones. (There's a good explanation of why this is the case, but it is only temporary.)

I would love to be able to run Linux on it at home without violating any rules or screwing up anything on the system. This would also allow me to show others at work how easy Linux is to use. A live CD is a potential approach, but it won't remember my config so I'd have to set it up from scratch every time which means it isn't worth it.

Re:quit being a cheap bastard

[Biogenesis]

And hopefully the HDD won't screw up after 1000 writes. Imagine doing heavy swapping on a flash drive only to find it corrupt after a couple of weeks due to the chip reaching it's write limit...goodby expensive USB storage.

Re:quit being a cheap bastard

[kannibal_klown]

Dell makes it pretty easy to swap out hard drives (at least, mine was back in the Celeron 466 days). On mine, it was just:
1. Remove a small screw
2. Pop out the drive
3. Put new drive in
4. Rescrew it.

However, not all notebooks are so modular. Some require dissasembling the case to get at the hard drive (though getting at the RAM is very easy). Some require you to remove the keyboard, some require splitting the case in half, etc.

However, even in those cases (no pun intended), it's not that bad so long as you know what you're doing. And, in my opinion, it's worth saving a computer (especially a laptop) if it just involved finding a new hard drive.

Old laptops are great. It's helpful to have one lying around just-in-case, and they can make great servers (low power and quiet).

Re:quit being a cheap bastard

[1u3hr]

I would love to be able to run Linux on it at home without violating any rules or screwing up anything on the system. This would also allow me to show others at work how easy Linux is to use. A live CD is a potential approach, but it won't remember my config so I'd have to set it up from scratch every time which means it isn't worth it.

You probably have a laptop able to run Knoppix, much more powerfula nd fun than waht the OP can. See here for how to save your config data, either to a hard disk (You are allowed to just store data, aren't you?) or floppy, or any other drive.

Re:quit being a cheap bastard

[Threni]

If that solution is cheaper than the one he's describing then he's hardly being a "cheap bastard", is he?

Re:quit being a cheap bastard

[Wakko Warner]

Because, out of all the posts in this story, most recommending the user buy this or that slow little piece-of-shit USB dongle drive, this guy's post was the only one that made any fucking sense.

It's not like they stopped making laptop hard drives.

- A.P.

Boot Everywhere Linux?

[ResidntGeek]

You could make a boot/root disk, and store kernel modules on the stick to save space. chroot into the memory stick and run from there.

damn

[l33t m4st3r]

damn small linux. there is a way to boot it off of a usb memory pen. there is a how-to on the page i think. i have done it before and it was the best thing ever.

Re:damn

[w1r3sp33d]

Hell yeah! I have been running this on several boxes as HD installs, it's great on older boxes. It runs fast on this old box next to me, P200mmx, 64megs of RAM, 2 gig HD. I put Firefox on it and use it for surfing the web. I am building a VMware session for it on my main laptop's XP partition tonight. Good luck, cheers all!

Re:damn

[Em Adespoton]

Flonix is based on DSL -- this is a custom USB edition that is quite nice :)

Re:damn

[Em Adespoton]

You might also be interested in Smart Bootmanager for older computers that can only boot to floppy/HDD.

Re:damn

[Walkiry]

I've got DSL running on a laptop with a dead HD and screen, PII-300 with 96 megs of RAM. Luckily the CD-ROM still works fine. It's chugging away seti@home work units quite happily, and I've got Nethack installed on it O:)

10:21:12 up 86 days, 16:17, 1 user

Damn Small Linux is really good. 50 Mb of Penguin Power.

Why boot from floppy?

[john.mull]

If your BIOS will support it, why not remove the floppy from the equation and boot directly from the memory card/key/stick/whatever? A 1 GB key would allow for a Knoppix install and a good bit of data, and then you're word processing with Open Office.

Re:Why boot from floppy?

[vinit79]

If your BIOS will support it, why not remove the floppy from the equation and boot directly from the memory card/key/stick/whatever? A 1 GB key would allow for a Knoppix install and a good bit of data, and then you're word processing with Open Office.

Its a IBM Thinkpad 390 Laptop, PII 266Mhz, 128 MB RAM, with USB 1.0 port and a 3.5 floppy drive.
And u think the bios will support booting of a usb memory stick ????

Re:Why boot from floppy?

[john.mull]

IBM is pretty good about keeping their BIOS updates uptodate. It would definitely be worth a try.

Re:Why boot from floppy?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's old enough that it probably won't boot from the usb, plus a cf card will die quickly b/c of excess read/write cycles caused by swap.

Re:Why boot from floppy?

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

If you wanted to copy Knoppix to a 1 GB device, you'd have to do a lot of work trimming down the packages, since the Knoppix disc uses a compressed filesystem containing over 1.4 GB of data..

Re:Why boot from floppy?

[calibanDNS]

Slashdot linked to this Ars Technica review of USB flash drives a while back. The nice thing is that the article lists which drives are bootable.

Re:Why boot from floppy?

[WeblionX]

You do realize that if by disc you mean CD, you are talking about 1.4GB on an 800MB device not fitting on a 1GB device.

Re:Why boot from floppy?

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

What part of 'compressed filesystem' do you not understand?

Re:Why boot from floppy?

[Devster]

I also have a Thinkpad.. its a 340... the same thing happened, HDD died. Now it's sitting there (its a good lappy for browsing the net etc), and since I can't find any HDD setup params in the BIOS and am wondering if the HDD params are factory set or auto (ie you can never put a bigger drive in there??), I'm reluctant to spend the $$$ on a new or old drive to test if its possible to fit a big 20GB on it....

This may be a similar reason why the Author doesn't want to spend the $$$ on an IBM spec replacement drive, or a bigger drive?? Anyone know the answer to this issue with the old thinkpads??

Re:Why boot from floppy?

[BlueStrat]

If his BIOS will support booting from a USB thumbdrive, (and even if it doesn't..see boot floppy note below) I'd try Damn Small Linux (Debian/Knoppix-based) http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/download.html
I gave DSL (Damn Small Linux) a try a revision or so back, and I was quite impressed, so the current version should be quite nice, and at only 50MB (!!!) only a small to medium sized thumbdrive would be needed, depending on extra space needed.
If you look at the FAQ page, there are intructions to make a boot floppy from Linux or Windows. Big upside is, just take the thumby with you, plug it into whatever/whoevers' PC you happen to be at, and have *your* desktop. Hope that helps :)

Strat

Re:Why boot from floppy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you checked out the IBM support pages? I bought a used Thinkpad 600E and found everything from drivers to parts lists, service manuals and linux installation instructions by searching on www.ibm.com.

Re:Why boot from floppy?

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

I think there's some confusion here between running Knoppix from the CD, and installing it to a HDD. I agree that it should be possible to copy the Knoppix ISO onto a 1GB device, then mount it using a loopback. But this would give you the equivalant of running it from CD (read only), which is quite different from installing the distro. If you install Knoppix to a HDD, it will take up over 1.4 GB with all packages.

Re:Why boot from floppy?

[Zelea]

I've been able to use the ODH Dual Bootable 128M USB pen from NETAC to run RUNT.

The main advantage of this pen is that it has a FD/HD switch and in the FD mode it emulates perfectly a USB floppy while making available only 1.4M of the flash memory. In the HD mode the rest of the flash (128 - 1.4) is available.

The trick is to toggle the FD/HD switch once the kernel has booted and voila you have the full RUNT system on a single USB pen.

So right now I have a bootable Linux system including the wireless orinoco drivers and a full bunch of utilities) on a flash pen.

Replace The Hard Drive

[SiMac]

On PriceWatch, a good 20GB drive will cost less than a 512MB USB memory key.

It's really not worth the amount of effort you'd have to put into this machine. I realize it's old and you don't want to waste more money on it, but spending hours of research to save $65 isn't worth it, especially considering even after all that research your computer will be slower and more of a pain in the ass than if you just spent the money.

Re:Replace The Hard Drive

[rytier]

are you sure it was a good & new 2.5" drive? ;-)
</flame>

Re:Replace The Hard Drive

[SiMac]

Yes, I am.

Use a bootable USB flash drive...

[Anonymous Coward]

They're cheap. Get lotsa ram.

Puppy Linux allows you to boot off of a usb card

[jomas1]

PUPPY Linux http://www.goosee.com/puppy/flash-puppy.htm
allows you to boot off a usb card and does not require a hard drive. Damn small linux and dynebolic are two other distros that work well with underpowered hardware and don't require harddrives but they both require cd drives.

Sorry, I have no idea if you can...

[slasher999]

...but it's a great idea. Imagine people everywhere could carry a USB jump drive of whatever you want to call them with everything they need on them - it's the ultimate in "mobile office". Still need the floppy I expect though, but it's a huge step in the right direction. Hey, just put an self extracting image of the floppy on the USB thing and extract it to a new floppy from a machine (with an installed OS) before booting with your USB thing.

Re:Sorry, I have no idea if you can...

[mikis]

No, it is a BAD idea. First, USB 1.0 is slooooow. I say that after waiting few minutes to copy 128MB of music to Creative MuVo MP3 player (old, USB 1.1 version).

Second, most of (all?) flash memory devices have limited number of read/writes -- few millions, maybe, but with all that swapping...

I'd just buy used hard drive... 2.1GB 2.5" HDDs are like 15-30$ on Ebay. Compared to 75$ for 8x smaller (512MB) USB Drive.

Re:Sorry, I have no idea if you can...

[slasher999]

Good point about the read/writes. I didn't realize that. What about the USB speeds though? Aren't the newer sticks coming out in a USB 2.0 form factor?

Re:Sorry, I have no idea if you can...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but do you think the laptop supports that? :)

Re:Sorry, I have no idea if you can...

[swv3752]

Well, USB1 is what the notebook comes with but consider, the guy is currently booting dos and some old word processor off a floppy disk. You complain about USB 1 speeds, but floppy is even slower. There are plennty of Linux Floppy Distros. With 128 mb of ram and a USB thumb drive, that would be great.

It should be simple to pick one of the distros and make a very workable solution. I mean if he has a 512 mb USB thumb drive, he could load something like Vector Linux on the USB drive and just make a boot floppy to mount the USB drive. Last time I used Vector it fit in 300mb. It should work pretty decent as it was designed for lowend machines.

ebay.

[compwizrd]

cost you maybe 25-30 bucks for a 2 gig hard drive, and if you actually looked, you could probably get an 8 for about that much.

Ignorant Stab...but a stab nonetheless...

[Eberlin]

Sounds like something those mandrakemove memory sticks are good for. But that's a knee-jerk reaction without any research whatsoever.

Re:Ignorant Stab...but a stab nonetheless...

[Eberlin]

Ok, that WAS an incredibly ignorant stab. The mandrakemove version comes with a bootable CD -- the memory stick is there to save personal files with. Not exactly what you're looking for, I suppose.

There is a more practical solution

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Solutions for pennies.

Re:There is a more practical solution

[Anonymous Coward]

..and in other news today, prices on 4gb 2.4" drives skyrocket to unbelievable highs as 1000s make insane bids on ebays auction web site, it's not known what might of caused the sudden surge in interest.

Re:There is a more practical solution

[alex_tibbles]

see above discussion of why this might not be a good idea.

Re:There is a more practical solution

[Russian Voyeur]

bullshitttt.....!!!

Limited lifespan

[PCM2]

As other people are constantly pointing out whenever somebody posts an idea like this, "non-volatile" memory like MemorySticks and CompactFlash has a limited lifespan. It wears out after a certain number of erase/write cycles. That actual number is probably in the hundreds of thousands, but if you've got a Linux swap partition on there you'll be pounding the silicon pretty hard. Add to that a floppy disc as your boot partition, and ... well ... this sounds like one of the more head-scratchingly silly ideas I've heard in a while.

Re:Limited lifespan

[BACbKA]

I'd suggest that anything like /tmp /var be put into a tiny ramdisk (eat, say, 64-96MB off your 256) in this setup, and swap be abandoned. Mount everything ro except for /home. Use a journaling file system on /home. This will minimize the wear described in the parent post.

Re:Limited lifespan

[gnu-sucks]

He has 128 megs of physical ram. Given the likely low memory usage of this installation, operating without a swap partition should be fine.

Re:Limited lifespan

[jweage]

According to this article, the lifespan is about 10,000 writes.

They also suggest using the noatime mount option for flash ram, which is a good suggestion.

Josh

Re:Limited lifespan

[Alan Hicks]

As other people are constantly pointing out whenever somebody posts an idea like this, "non-volatile" memory like MemorySticks and CompactFlash has a limited lifespan.

Correct, and that is the main limitation of such devices. Just off the top of my head here, I can come up with an idea that just might work, but the OP had better be damn well prepared to use a very lightweight distro.

Step 1: Partition that USB drive. You're going to need a very small / partition, and a much larger /usr partition. These are not to be messed with. You'll also need a /home-flash partition large enough for your personal use, and of course, a backup plan for when that drive fails.
Step 2: Build your kernel. This can be tricky. Building a kernel that accesses the USB drive can't be that difficult, but you'll also need initrd support. Why? Well, because you've got 128 MB of RAM, and you certainly don't want to write to that flash drive all the time. Make a small, perhaps 32 MB initrd and mount it at /var. You can modify your init scripts to populate this directory safely. Symlink /tmp to /var/tmp, and now you've cut down a lot of your writes to your flash device.
Step 3: Make yourself another 32MB initrd and mount it a /home. Again, your init scripts can safely populate this with all your dot-files. Anything you definately want to save must be manually copied to the /home-flash partition. Optionally you can take a look at the scripts included with Slax. One script (IIRC configsave) will make a tar.gz of all those pertinant files and save them to a partition on a USB flash drive.

It should be noted that I don't know if the linux kernel can make and support multiple RAM drives at once. If not, just make one RAM drive, mount it a /var, and make /home a symlink to /var/home.

Re:Limited lifespan

[pla]

Very good suggestions. At a previous job, I created a custom embedded distro to do something similar to what you point out.

A few comments, though...


It should be noted that I don't know if the linux kernel can make and support multiple RAM drives at once.

Yes, not a problem at all. For earlier kernels, you'll need to tell it to allow 32+ MB ramdisks and loopback support, but you can mount two ramdisks at a time without a problem (and probably far more, though I never tried more than three).


If not, just make one RAM drive, mount it a /var, and make /home a symlink to /var/home.

I consider this the better option anyway, since it doesn't force both /var and /home to fit into an arbitrary sized space (some days you may need a ton of user files, some days you may need a ton of logging, why unneccessarily limit each?). I would also add /tmp and /etc to those as well (/etc takes some work to get it on a ramdisk, but you can do it).


Finally, for writing data back to the nonvolatile storage, I'd recommend using a journaling FS, preferably one that understands the idea of wear leveling. JFFS2 does, but has general limitations that make it painful to use. AFAIK, neither Reiser nor EXT3 do wear leveling, though that may have changed in the few years since I played with all this.

Re:Limited lifespan

[swv3752]

Most modern USB flash drives have circuitry in them to do wear leveling automatically. This is how they can survive being fat formatted.

I think it would probably be best to skip journaling altogether and just format with ext2. Even Windows has utils to read ext2, so your data won't be stranded. JFFS2 is pretty much relegated to embedded devices that don't have the builltin wear leveling circuitry.

Considering the large amount of writes a Flash drive supports (the most common number is I see bandied about is 100,000) I think it would be fine to hhave /home on the flash drive. I would even consider disable logging and just use initrd to mount the usb drive. Thhe USB flashh drives are cheap. I recently got a USB2 16mb drive just for attending a free MS seminar. It should be easy to score one.

Re:Limited lifespan

[AliasTheRoot]

So put swap in RAM.

Re:Limited lifespan

[Lumpy]

sorry but 128meg of system ram and the right embedded linix distro + abiword and swap space is not needed in any way.

Hell I have a few systems floating here without swap space and thay have less than 64Meg of ram.

Swap space is for bloat or trying to use apps that are way over your system's memory capabilities.

install X, use blackbox for your WM, use abiword,opera and sylpheed for email.

hell I bet I can run frozen bubble on that.

remember that there are a lot of us using linux comfortably when our fastest machine was much smaller than that P-II in speed and had his RAM in megabytes as our hard drive space.

no problem, and putting a laptop IDE to CF converter in there with a 128-256meg CF card stuffed in it would work very well. (i just bought a 256megCf for $19.00 from Ecost.com)

I'm betting it would even increase battery life significantly!

Re:Limited lifespan

[Trixter]

You don't put swap on a flash drive -- he's got 128MB of RAM, he shouldn't need swap at all if he doesn't run X.

Unless the IDE interface is broken

[AC-x]

You may as well just buy a new hard disk, you can probably get a 2nd hand 2.5" drive in eBay for very little.

Of course, if your BIOS supports booting from a USB cd-rom you could use a linux boot disk

Flash hard drive

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bother with a USB memory stick when you get can CF card->IDE adaptors? Here's one outfit that sells an adaptor that works for desktop computers.

I'm sure adaptors for laptop drives exist. If not, one could easily be built--it's a simple matter of changing the connector type, because CF cards have a built in IDE compatible interface!

Just Buy A Hard Drive

[blackmonday]

It would really simplify your life to buy a new hard drive. Those thumb drives / memory sticks aren't very fast compared to a hard disk. Plus for the price of a thumb drive of that size, you could just get a new or used notebook HD and save some cash.

For $130 you could get a new laptop

[Mustang Matt]

Seriously I bet you could find some deals on ebay and get a new laptop with a hard drive faster than what you've got. Maybe I'm wrong. I got a vpr matrix 175b4 for $375 missing ac adapter and battery.

It would be nice if you could do what you're trying to do though. Then you could take your OS with you and use any modern computer with your OS and your settings in theory.

I'm just wondering how slowly linux would load up off of usb 1.1?

Cake

[Apreche]

It's a piece of cake. I've got a board at work running Linux (not uClinux, real linux) with the entire file system in flash. It has no moving parts and works great. Just build a kernel with support for the USB drive. In your fstab mount this drive as /. Follow the linux from scratch instructions to build the smallest system possible. You'll probably want to use busybox to the maximum.

Also when building the kernel try to minimize the number of modules you build. Build things into the bzimage if you have the option. But at the same time only include the bare minimum things necessary.

Lastly when you are building things with gcc be sure to use Os to optimize for size.

Since its an x86 system if the USB drive is supported by the kernel this shouldn't be difficult at all.

Re:Cake

[drinkypoo]

And in case you're wondering, you can download all those files for linuxfromscratch from them directly, but you will not be able to download them all from their actual home sites.

Also note, you need to not have a swap partition :D

What about ZipSlack

[Open_Matrix42]

Being a big slackware fan I have to mention ZipSlack. I'm not sure what it would take to get that to boot from a usb memory stick but I can't imagine it being very hard. Link

Re:What about ZipSlack

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck does a FAT linux system have to do with anything? God damn, you're an idiot.

One option

[eeg3]

One option would be to continue using a floppy disk to boot your linux system. Rolling a floppy distro isn't too hard, plenty of tutorials on google. However, apart from how a normal floppy would do it, add the memory stick to the fstab and mount it as /usr or /home, etc.

I'm sure there are better ways to do it, but that idea popped up to me.

Re:One option

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, I am a complete novice when it comes to Linix, so if this would not work, then ignore it. =)
~~~~

Get a small, floppy sized Linix distro to boot from. Once booted, have it configured so you can eject that disk.

Insert a floppy, possibly for the swap partition?

Use the non-volitile memory (such as memory sticks) as storage space, to save them from the "silicon pounding" of swap, mentioned earlier by someone else.

It may take some kernel hacking, but would this work? it has my curiousity piqued.
~~~~
I am eager to hear from you Linix guru's out there on this.

Re:One option

[eeg3]

A floppy for a swap partition? I don't know much 1.44mb of swap is going to help... even barring the fact that swapping from a slow device such as a floppy drive is probably bad anyway.

All you need...

[gnu-sucks]

...is a Debian boot floopy. Custom-compile a kernel that supports your USB or Memory Stick/Compact Flash/Whatever devices, put it on the floppy. Format the external media so that linux can read it (and it may already be able to, so the choice to format may come down to performance).

Make a short script to mount the external media on boot up, and install everything you need from there.

Obviously, having another computer running a BSD or Linux distro will greatly help you achieve this.

Don't be surprised if the fruits of your labor yield a very fast graphical linux box.

I use a CF adapter in my notebook.

[Cybersonic]

I have an older 400mhz Dell notebook. I am currently using a CF to IDE adapter in it.

http://store.ituner.com/ituner/emstcfl.html

It works great, i am using a 256 meg sandisk compact flash card and feather linux.

http://featherlinux.berlios.de/

Overall the performance is not too bad. Battery life is MUCH better without the hard drive. Write speed is not too great, but since I usually ssh into my server and leech from there, i dont need to worry about that much... :)

it's possible

[Da_Slayer]

There have been many projects over the years to run Linux on just one floppy disc and within other very tight space/memory requirements.

Some examples of Linux distros that do this are:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/byld
http:/ /www.fdlinux.com/

But I really think you are looking for this:
http://linuxmobile.sourceforge.net/

Linux Mobile System (LMS) is a full Linux system whose support is the new USB Flash Memory Drives. The intention is to boot any PC with USB support with our system and therefore we will have every administration and analysis applications that we have selected, so we will not need install it. This way, always we will be able to get our Linux system ready to use in our pocket.

Now if you cannot boot the laptop with the USB connection I am sure you can use a mini/micro distrobution to boot the system with USB support and then have it read and run off the USB drive.

I hope this information is helpful in your quest. =P

Have a CD drive? Way to much for a lappy drive.

[Unholy_Kingfish]

Why nor use a Linux boot CD like Knoppix or SuSe? If you don't have a CD-ROM, a hard drive isn't that expensive. I understand the power savings part, but you might only be able to do so much with a non bootable USB port.

Look at the different Linux Thin Clients

[woobieman29]

Google is your friend. Check out The Linux Bootable USB Key HOWTO . Particularly the piece about the Flonix Knoppix variant.

Just think...

[kraksmokr]

Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things?

She's dead jim

[chrispl]

I have been keeping an old compaq laptop alive with Knoppix 3.4 for a while. Of course its saving grace is a CD drive to boot it from... I would say get a cheap USB CD drive but: a. USB 1.0 at 1.1mbps will not be fun to run an OS from. b. I don't think the chances are too great of such an old device's BIOS of being capable of supporting booting from USB. c. No storage space other than floppy. Unless you run the CD and a USB key on a USB hub, which sounds just nasty performance wise. Time to pick up a cheap notebook or palmtop. An old HP jornada off ebay can be formatted to run linux off a 256mb CF card. Maybe that would be something to replace it with on the cheap?

Re:She's dead jim

[gl4ss]

or.. just replace the now dead hd with something, be it some ata flash thingy or a new hd.

No. Use PCMCIA.

[Anonymous Coward]

USB is the most retarded solution possible. Especially in a 266Mhz laptop, where the USB will be 1.1 and absolutely dismal to load an OS off of.

Instead, use the fucking PCMCIA slot for it's intended purpose. Find a flash PC card or CF adaptor and go to town. It'll be infinitely faster, and you won't have a stupid USB drive hanging off the side of your computer, Linux desperately sucking at it like trying to breathe through a Hi-C straw.

look harder?

[Loie]

from a little Googling, it looks like your IBM Thinkpad 390 will accept a standard issue 4200RPM hard drive, which I'm finding for much less than $130 USD. Newegg.com has a 20GB Toshiba drive for less than $80 USD. Also, it looks like 512MB flash drives run for about $70... running linux w/o a hard drive has a 'cool' factor, sure, but i'd rather have about 40 times the storage space for a few dollars more.

Re:look harder?

[WuphonsReach]

Or 80 times the storage for $80.

(40GB drives are only about $10 more expensive then the $20GB notebook drives.)

not worth it

[whowho]

unless you are going in for the science value of it.

consider:
- your time
- the cost of USB/CF sticks
- the usability of the setup (slow)

all of it would add up to more than the $130 or whatever for the HD.

it would be just a case of hacking up your own custom kernel and mounting the USB stick.

Power Consumption

[Senator_B]

If you choose to just use a USB stick in place of your hard disk, you will also increase your battery life significantly due to the fact that you don't have to spin up a hard disk.

I'd use the quick and easy option.

[kiwioddBall]

I'd buy a new hard disk.

I do this... occasionally

[kunudo]

I have a ton of computers, like alot of others here, I suppose. Now, my newest Athlon XP system is really noisy, but an old pentiumIII I have is really silent. So I boot Feather Linux on it from my 128meg twinmos pendrive. It can't boot from USB though, but there's a bootdisk on the Feather Linux website that enables this. It's nice for that size(60 MB I think), and has 2 word processors(!)(why), a web browser, pdf support, nmap, and lots more. And it's real easy to add modules to too. Give it a try.

Answer: maybe

[Erwos]

The biggest problem for this trick is going to be storage. A single floppy disk isn't really large enough to hold the Linux kernel anymore (in these days of 2.6.x). The most important part is going to be shoving the USB drivers straight in the kernel (or the initrd?) so that your memory stick as is picked up in time for your kernel to finish booting off it.

That said, there should really be no reason why you couldn't boot from a floppy and tell it to use the USB mem stick as /. Just a couple kernel parameters, I think.

That said, everyone else is right, and you should just spring for a new hard drive or laptop. Memory sticks are slow, and they're not designed for the kind of heavy usage your primary drive is.

-Erwos

Re:Answer: maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

That said, I think you need to stop saying "that said", you cock sucking fag ass with no life.

RUNT!

[Kyosuke77]

I saw this and I immediately thought of RUNT!

It's an adaptation of ZipSlack designed to run off a USB memory key. Usually it needs the aid of a boot floppy to get things rolling, but theoretically it can be booted off the memory key alone on systems that support it. Few systems support USB booting properly, though, so I think you'll find you need the floppy.

Admittedly, it is designed for testing a machine's network connection more than anything, but it still has a fairly complete set of packages (basically anything ZipSlack has). If you want to customize, you can just trade off some of the packages in RUNT for the ones you want, or you can get ZipSlack and go from scratch. Using RUNT would be easier, though, since it's already properly configured for using the USB key.

Re:RUNT!

[pointbeing]

I've used RUNT for more than a year - the only thing I didn't like was the umsdos filesystem so I managed to format a USB pen drive as ext2 and went native. Very impressive.

I've found there's varying support and no clear standard when it comes to booting from USB flash devices - for example my test Dell GX150 would boot from the device but it took damn near 20 minutes, where recent Compaq laptops would boot from the thing just fine.

My solution was first to use a boot floppy - but then I modified things a little and wrote the boot files to a business-card sized CD-R and have been much happier with that setup. Much faster boot times than either floppy or pen drive.

I'm using a bit larger pen drive (512mb) and gave the drive a static IP that matches my web/mail server. Since I only have about ten users on the mail server I can plug the pen drive into any PC on my home network and users can continue to send and receive mail while I'm fixing the busted Linux box - it also serves up a web page that tells folks my website is down but I'm working on it. Pretty handy tool ;-)

Re:RUNT!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been able to use the ODH Dual Bootable 128M USB pen
from http://www.netac.com to run RUNT.

The main advantage of this pen is that it has a FD/HD switch
and in the FD mode it emulates perfectly a USB floppy while
making available only 1.4M of the flash memory. In the HD mode
the rest of the flash (128 - 1.4) is available.

Since booting from USB-HDD mode is not very common in BIOSes
(and when it is it's very buggy) this pen allows you to boot
from every motherboard which support at least the "Booting from
USB floppy" option. The trick is to toggle the FD/HD switch
once the kernel has booted and voila you have the full RUNT
system on a single USB pen.

Win98

[mekkab]

I've got win98 on a p166 (runs: VPN software, Office 2k, Exceed X station stuff, Photoshop) and win98 on a p233 super-slim laptop (same apps).

Everything runs fine and I'm not even using a stripped down linux (which I'm sure would smoke!).

Give me your old hardware.

Re:Win98

[thaWhat]

redhat 5 fluxbox dillo nedit sylpheed on an nec versa (dx2/50) w/ 20 MB and 300MB (running constantly @ 97%) goes well, currently upgrading to omnibook 366 64MB 12GB gentoo. so far, so-so....

Re:Win98

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right... good plan. I'd forgotten that Win98 runs on a single floppy!

Re:Win98

[mekkab]

hardee har har!

Nah, I'm talking about the parent above- his comment was "266? screw that! it sucks!" My intention was to say that an under powered machine can still surf the web, word process, get me to work and back, and even have some MHZs for photoshop!

Re:Win98

[Halfbaked Plan]

I've got Windows 98 on a 486DX-100 machine, with 32 megs of RAM. It connects to my wireless hub with a PC card wireless NIC and works prefectly adequate for non-multimedia Web browsing from the porch. It also runs Office 2000 quite adequately. I wouldn't get up in front of 1000 people to run a Powerpoint Presentation on it, of course...

(but almost anything reasonable you want to do with Powerpoint in a presentation you can do as well with regular HTML in a projected browser window)

Regarding running Linux off Memory Cards

[eyefish]

A couple of things to keep in mind with Memory Cards:

1. Memory Cards usually have a "number of write times" which is sometimes around 100,000 writes. This is much more than enough when you're using the card for saving photos, and a card could probably last you a lifetime for this purpose. However, when you put an operating system with a swap filesystem on it, which reads/writes tons of times constantly, 100,000 becomes very restrictive and you could easily damage the card in a month or so depending on ussage. NOTE however that not all cards are created equal, so do some research on this. Try searching for MTBF (mean time between failures) along with the type of card you're planning on using on google.

2. Although it is true many flash cards are slow compared to hard drives, some can be as fast or faster (depending on your system). For example, the SanDisk Ultra II CF cards have a *minimum* sustained write speed of 9 MB/s (that's MegaBytes per second, or aprox. 72 Megabits per second) which is VERY fast (however I do not know its MTBF specs). You can get such a 1GB card for about US$220. However, nowdays it is still MUCH cheaper to buy a hard drive.

Re:Regarding running Linux off Memory Cards

[jhoger]

MTBF means mean time between failure, not mean writes between failure.

If you really want to know how many times you can erase a sector of flash, that is defined. Typical consumer flash devices are rated for 100,000 erasures. However, the actual factors that go into lifetime are:

1. How good the wear leveling algorithms are
2. How full the flash disk is
3. How much space you have altogether
4. How often the processes you normally run write to the flash disk
5. Number of erasures your flash part is rated for

No one is going to be able to figure out what that means for them except by measuring actual use... i.e. trying it out while the disk driver is instrumented in some way.

In general I think the best advice is:

1. Keep a large percentage of the flash disk free
2. Keep files that are truly temporary/intermediate files, logs, etc. in ram disk.
3. Try it for a day and see what files are changing on the disk, and see if you can get those moved to RAM disk. Some you can't, like your working files (documents).

Re:Regarding running Linux off Memory Cards

[swv3752]

Skip haveing swap altogether. Disable logging. Moving /tmp to a ram drive might be a good idea.

Re:Regarding running Linux off Memory Cards

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a number of things that can be done to help Linux along with flash. Some have already been mentioned but it does hurt to cover things again.

One item that helps is to partition your system across a few devices. Thus items that are more or less readonly stay on one device while stuff that is heavily read write stays on another.

Have your flash device mounted in such a way that spurious writes do not occur. Read an article on this awhile back, of course I can remember where now.

Do consider the use of a floopy for some data. I say that realizing that a floppy is almost useless for todays data sizes. This is where USB devices would come in handy. I suspect that this is a better use of USB than having your entire system hangiing off it.

RAM disk should be considered your friends. That is if you have enough RAM to evne think about it.

Re:Regarding running Linux off Memory Cards

[edunbar93]

The solution to the problem of having your swap filesystem on your 1 GB flash disk is to have 0.5 GB of RAM and the system never touches the swap space.

That might be a little hard in this guy's case, but I'm sure he'll find a way to not use swap. We've been avoiding this for years after all.

Re:Regarding running Linux off Memory Cards

[Anonymous Coward]

*minimum* sustained write speed of 9 MB/s (that's MegaBytes per second, or aprox. 72 Megabits per second) which is VERY fast

Huh?? What the hell are you smoking and how did you slip some to the mods??? An ATA 133 interface tops out at 133MegaBytes a second. Most current production ATA drives top out around 1/2 of that, 50-60MegaBytes a second for read, lower for write. 9 MegaBytes a second hasn't been fast since I was dling porn on a 14.4 modem onto a 200MegaByte hard drive running Windows For Workgroups.

Re:Regarding running Linux off Memory Cards

[Anonymous Coward]

You are forgetting that the disk wastes a lot of time seeking around, unlike the flash memory...

Knoppix from USB--been done

[Anonymous Coward]

It should be simple enough. Here's a FAQ on it even: link

Re:'Nobody's time is free.'

[oliverthered]

Somebody doesn't get sarcasum.... Now that's atroll.

Cost is about $55 for this...

[Cybersonic]

Continued:

$20 for the CF to IDE adapter and $35 for the 256 meg compact flash drive.

Featherlinux is basically a stripped down Knoppix. Perfect for this project, IMHO. I installed Firefox and the iCandy theme.

I looked at the other distros out there, but I could not find one that used Fluxbox, and had the selection of apps that Feather linux had. My system has 128 megs of ram in it, and the only time I have issues is when I have over 10 or so tabs open in Firefox. Without swap, firefox is not happy... Of course, this is expected with a system with so little resources.

The real reason to not want the hard drive

[btempleton]

Is to create totally silent linux boxes out of old laptops for applications where you want this silence. Media servers, living room web browsing station etc.

There are linux distros that will boot and run from CD-rom, but of course they access the noisy cd-rom all the time.

There are network based distros but they go so overboard, they want to get everything from the LAN, which is not so fast and slow to boot up.

In fact, in many cases the hard drive in the laptop is still there, it's just not perfectly silent.

I would like a distro which booted from hard drive (or CD-rom, or floppy) and after loading what it wanted, and mounting network filesystems, shut down the noisy boot device for good, or at least until some unusual activity called for it.

Re:The real reason to not want the hard drive

[Anonymous Coward]

hdparm -Y put IDE drive to sleep
hdparm -y put IDE drive in standby mode

Re:The real reason to not want the hard drive

[vadim_t]

I'm trying to do this right now.

The idea is to try to set up a mail/web server that turns off the hard disk at night. Mail would get delivered to flash, then moved to the hard disk during the day. The mini-linux system that will run from Flash is almost done, next I will be writing a PAM module, so that when somebody checks the mail it's automatically moved to the hard disk.

So it's still possible the hard disk will go on once in a while, but it should be silent most of the time. The UPS should be quite happy with that as well.

Re:The real reason to not want the hard drive

[hackstraw]

would like a distro which booted from hard drive (or CD-rom, or floppy) and after loading what it wanted, and mounting network filesystems, shut down the noisy boot device for good, or at least until some unusual activity called for it.

So long as your distro comes with hdparm. Read the manpage. Especially the -S option.

Re:The real reason to not want the hard drive

[PhracturedBlue]

I have mostly accomplished this. It is a bit more difficult than you might expect, especially if you use the laptop for web-browsing/ssh/X (which is my use). My solution was
a) install XFCE. I want firefox, and xfce is a very low-resource desktop (choose something else if you want, but I find XFCE fits the bill)
b) use a 2.6 kernel (it has a very good laptop mode). Make sure to install the laptop-mode script (and a filesystem which supports noatime). Also hpdarm -S # is good for spinning down the drive after it's been accessed

c) mount /var/log as tmpfs (i don't have much ram in m system, and I need all I can for a filesystem cache)
d) remove as many services as possible

Once firefox is up and running, this system barely ever accesses the harddrive. It is silent 95% of the time, and is fully functional for web-browsing and connecting to other systems. The hd turns on at 6am when cron-jobs run, and occasionally when using javascript webpages, and that is it.
Doing an:
echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump
is very useful for determining which apps are writing to the hd and when.

Re:The real reason to not want the hard drive

[btempleton]

Spinning down the drive is of course doable, but the goal is to stop anything from wanting to access it again, including running programs which were executed from that drive, and future programs that might get invoked.

You can of course boot from the silent medium (network drive or flash) but that's slow and more limited.

Ordinary operations -- displaying slideshows, surfing the web, playing media, running most cronjobs, should not try to wake up the disk.

Re:The real reason to not want the hard drive

[wohlford]

Knoppix can run directly from RAM. Makes stuff go real fast. The command is 'knoppix toram'. Of course, you need enough RAM to hold a cd. I'd recommend about 1GB. See http://www.knoppix.net/docs/index.php/CheatCodes for cheat codes.

Knoppix + Boot Floppy

[nuxx]

I don't know why noone has said this yet, but why not stick a copy of Knoppix in one partition on a large USB keychain device and boot it using a floppy with a boot manager on it? Then use the other partition on the keychain device for data storage.

Booting Knoppix will eliminate the need for massive amounts of read/write, and you'd still have a bit of space to store whatever it is you are working on.

Re:Knoppix + Boot Floppy

[dan2550]

Personally, i have found that knoppix cand be extremely slow on older systems, even when using a minimalistic window manager.

A delimma faced many times

[psyburn]

Oh dear. You don't say that it has a CD-ROM so MandrakeMove, Knoppix, and PHLAK are all out of the question. *sigh*
And they are so easy to use too... :'(
Oh well.....A USB-CDROM boot option in the BIOS looks promising.

Card services and Hard Drives.

[twitter]

If you can get card services up with your boot floppy, and you should, it should not be hard to mount the CF as a disk there. Access time is faster than most CF devices and PC card adaptors do not require you to open the laptop.

I'd just get another hard drive. If the system does not have a CD, do the install on another machine, move it and tweak it as required. Mepis and other Knoppix based distributions should work without much or any modification. Moreover, they should work very well on that hardware. For what it's worth, my 90MHz P1 Thinkpad is jealous of your memory and processor but happy with it's five gig hard drive and Woody. Save the HD caddy, if the yours has one! They are easy to work with, but hard to find.

USB 1.1...

[B4RSK]

Don't forget that your old laptop is going to be USB 1.1 only. Maximum transfer rate of 11Mbps or about 1.4MBps. Painful at best, agonizing most of the time.

A CF card adapter using your notebook's IDE interface would be better, but still slow.

By the time you buy an ATA/CF adapter and a 512MB CF card it will be cheaper to just buy another hard disk. The hard disk will also be considerably faster and last a lot longer.

Performance tips

[Short Circuit]

My laptop is a 166MHz with 96MB of RAM and a 1.6GB hard drive. Running Debian.

With a 266MHz system, you're going to need to be careful about the weight of the software you run.

First, skip any of the major Office varieties for Linux (OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, etc.) ... they'll all run hideously slow. If you can, do you word processing as plain text. If you absolutely need formatting (and you're not handy with LaTeX and related apps like Lyx), use HTML. Raw code is good, but if that doesn't work for you, try Bluefish (requires X). Once you're on a desktop system, you can import it into OpenOffice or Word, where you can make any additional formatting changes you need.

If your laptop can take more RAM, install it. You'll need it. For my ThinkPad 760XL, installation of the SO-DIMMS wasn't too hard.

If you possibly can, do without X. That'll save you a world of time, especially when loading your OS off a USB flash disk. If you need X, go with a lightweight windowmanager, like twm. If that's a bit too extreme, try oroborus.

You're going to want as little memory footprint as possible. However, you're still probably going to need swap space, so I'd recommend against a flash device. Get one of the USB hard drives.

That's all I can really think of ATM.

Re:Performance tips

[swv3752]

Well, on my 366 Celeron, all those weighty apps works fine, though OOo is a bit slow to open. I would think Abiword would be OK on a 266mhz. but if you can run everything from CLI, then that will be considerably faster. With 128mb RAM, swap should be able to skipped.

The simplest solution is to run a 1-3 disk Linux Floppy Distro. Mount /home and maybe /usr off the USB Flash drive and be done.

How I'd do it.

[pestie]

I've been giving this some thought recently. I think it's a great idea for a number of reasons. A system with no moving parts (i.e. reliable and silent) comes to mind.

With the setup described, I'd compile a custom kernel with USB support and put the root filesystem on the USB stick. Only the kernel needs to be on the floppy - no DOS/loadlin necessary. "make bzdisk" should do it.

$20 or so will get you a CompactFlash to IDE converter. The system will see the CF card as a hard drive, which means you don't need BIOS support for booting from USB or anything like that. a 64M card is plenty big enough to hold something like Damn Small Linux with some space left over for storage, and it won't cost you too much. If you don't mind spending more, get a 1G card and use a full-blown Knoppix distribution.

[rant mode: on]
Why do people feel the need to post replies like, "Just get a new laptop hard drive" or "Throw out that crappy old system; it's worthless anyway?" This project seems pretty obviously cool to me. If you can't see that, or just don't agree, fine, but is your opinion really so valuable that you need to clutter up the comments with it? I still run Linux on an ancient laptop (P166, 64M RAM) and it's quite capable of doing a number of cool things.
[rant mode: off]

Go buy a replacement hard drive.

[Flower]

Even if it cost you a $130. You've said it yourself. You know nothing about linux but you essentially want to tackle turning your laptop into an embedded device. You're also trying to poll /. to find/create a solution for you. If you screw up the patitioning on your cf card do we get a new Ask Slashdot article?

Buy the drive, learn a thing or two about linux and then research this down the road. Honestly, this is the best advice I can give you.

Search linux-thinkpad mailing list

[nsushkin]

Try searching linux-thinkpad mailing list.

For example, article about booting from CompactFlash may help.

In terms of desktop...

[Cloud K]

Use ROX-Session and ROX-Filer (rox.sourceforge.net), and maybe an older but reasonable distribution such as RedHat 7.3. I've had that combination working great on some old Celeron-300/32MB machines I'm refurbishing for a non-profit, and it's quite an intuitive interface for experienced users and newbies alike.

GNOME and a recent distro simply with unnecessary software / services removed might not even be too bad on a 128MB machine (just don't try KDE!)

Re:BSD Laptops w/Gorgeous Babes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ceren is soooooooooooooo cute.

Beats Mercatur any day!

How-switch, Multi-OS capability?

[davidsyes]

Is anyone building one of these things as a Proof of Concept? I understand that memory uses more battery juice than the HDD itself.

I think my ideas below and my question above come from my curiosity of how long the portable/hand-held DVD players last. I also wonder how long MP3 device batteries last. Days? Aside from the LCD and CPU chewing up maybe 60% of the battery life, at LEAST the storage and boot and system file devices could be on CF/Smart Media. Maybe someone might want to take the LSB to a new level: Optimizing the installation and locating of system files based on the type of medium to which the OS and user files are being written during install. And, suspend-to-disk, ACPI, and APM problems could be made to go away to a good extent, probably because the disk spinning is eliminated. i am not sure about communicating devices (modems and NICs), tho.

Imagine this:

-- Multi-slot CF/Smart-Media bay
-- O/S Memory sticks/ in each CF/SM bay
-- Energy-efficient/Solar or ambient-light-powered LCD
-- Ability to swap O/S on the fly
-- IR or compatible/comparable input device with own power supply (like the battery-powered Logitech mice...)

Can't laptops go Solid State now? I imagine much of the laptop industry is sustained by momentum to keep cranking out mechanical disks. If an efficient CF/SM platter or storage surface can be optically read by something that is not having to spin at some 7,000 or 10,000 RPM, a lot of other savings might be made.

Also, it seems laptop boards have fewer and fewer soldered components. Further reductions should lead to greater opportunity to bring solid-state laptops to consumer hands. If the OS could be on one the disk, and be swappable, the data on another swappable, disk, then when will a light switch on to make solid-state laptops that hold VMWare or Win4Lin in a Linux environment? VMWare and NeTraverse could then reduce their costs of product just by jumping to distribution/deployment of millions vice 10s of thousands. This would probably devastate ms' foothold, especially of XUL or XML or other code and W3C standards were followed better.

Re:How-switch, Multi-OS capability?

[Zone-MR]

Making the hard drive solid-state will not make all problems magically dissapear.

The hard drive probably isn't even a major drain on the batteries.

There are already solid-state portable computers with low power consumption and solid-state components at the expense of proccessing power. They are called PDAs. Ever seen a WinCE handheld? Or a psion? Seems just like what you've described.

Re:How-switch, Multi-OS capability?

[Wraithlyn]

"I understand that memory uses more battery juice than the HDD itself."

Where'd you get that idea?

Common sense would seem to indicate that spinning a metal platter at high speed and physically moving read/write heads, will take more energy than shuttling some electrons around.

For a real world indicator, look up the specs for any device that supports Compact Flash II (which means it will also support a microdrive), and check out the battery life. Microdrive operation always offers significantly less battery life. I can't imagine a laptop HDD being more efficient.

Re:How-switch, Multi-OS capability?

[davidsyes]

"There are already solid-state portable computers with low power consumption and solid-state components at the expense of proccessing power. They are called PDAs. Ever seen a WinCE handheld? Or a psion?"

Yes, I've seen them, but don't own any, nor have I used them. However, For those of us in the mainstream who need or crave a 15" display, even dropping a PDA into a cradle and using an associated folding, pocket-sized keyboard might not do.

I guess what I am proposing is eventually likely to become a threat to the current hard disk industry. I read somewhen back that IBM's (solid state) microdrives? might be the way of the future of disks.

But, I seem never able to get my Mandrake-based laptop to EVER sync up correctly from suspend. It's either the video not being restored, the disk not waking up, or something else, even in Mdk 10. Probably it's me, esp since I am using a (Feb 2001 mfg date of) Vaio PCG-FX215, and the BIOS has maybe 50% of the features I see in current laptop BIOS's.

But, the thing about having a full-sized, energy-efficient laptop is that it could host a good number of hot-swappabel, o/s swappable medium, as well as, conceivably, accept and eject hot-swappable memory in a pinch.

With every install/reinstall/upgrade of my laptop, I never go past 65,000 colors. Partly because I can't tell the difference and I am not in graphics design/layout, and partly because I understand that driving 16 BEEL-YON colors surely will drive the video processor to chew up more power. The hotter the laptop (from video, disk, ram chips, and even the CPU heat sink (I touched mine and the aluminum sink is HOT!), along with the spinning fan (I unplugged it, but after 10 minutes plugged it back in since I cannot afford yet to destroy the CPU or the laptop...), will knock my Vaio out in about 25 minutes.

I envy those who have the latest IBM thinkpads. I saw one guy in Mountain View around Dec or Jan who claimed he got 4 to 5 hours running RH. But his l/t was maybe 12 inches in display, and benefitted from newer components, and maybe a slower-spinning disk. I cannot even throttle my fan, nor spin down the disk. Mdk 10 community from the May or June issue of Linux Format I bought throttled my CPU fan up and down all night. I was so used to the constant noise of the unregulated fan that I had to put my head under my pillow. Now, with the latest MDK 10, I don't get ANY throttling, regardless of what kernel I boot into.

Regards,

David Syes

Re:How-switch, Multi-OS capability?

[pyrrhonist]

I read somewhen back that IBM's (solid state) microdrives? might be the way of the future of disks.

IBM Microdrives are hard disks in a CompactFlash type II form factor, not memory drives. You can pick up a 360MB for about 50 bucks now. Pretty sweet.

Re:How-switch, Multi-OS capability?

[davidsyes]

I realize now that I'd mis-typed. My brain and fingers weren't in sync. I should have said "CPU consumption is often greater than the power drained by the HDD". I'd read that in Linux Magazine, July 2004 issue, page 36, article titled "Linux on the Laptop":

Paragraph: "Saving Power Redux: CPU Frequency Scaling

The CPU is the single most power hungry component of your laptop."

On page 37, Paragraph: "Saving More Power: Hard Disk Spin-down

After the CPU, your hard disk is your laptop's most power-hungry component. As long as it spins, it consumes power.

Linux's out-of-the-box configuration makes it nearly impossible to spin down the hard disk, as the operating system performs flushes every few minutes. So, to successfully spin down the hard disk, you'll need two different tools: a swcript to set laptop_mode in the kernel, and the hdparm utility."

Page 38: Paragraph: "Lasting a Long Time: Swap Management

The Final tip to conserve batter life is to disable your swap when running on battery power. Disabling swap causes all of your programs and data to be served out of RAM, thereby generating less hard disk traffic. Disabling swap should also allow your hard disk to go to sleep faster."

---------

After reading your reply to me, Wraithlyn, I figured I'd better correct myself and try to find the magazine article, something on the Net, or both. So, I also went to Google to:

http://www.google.com/search?q=lcd%20battery%20c on sumption%20laptop&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

-----------

http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=115086474

Ace's Hardware General Message Board ... that the laptop will run 50% longer time on battery when the LCD is turned off. The
LCD is estimated to account for around 33% of the total power consumption. ...
www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=115086474 - 15k - Cached - Similar pages
[ More results from www.aceshardware.com ]

---------

http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=115086406

"Ace's Hardware General Message Board ... the reported power consumption number is the full system power consumption (actually
battery power drain), including hard disk, RAM, LCD, 802.11g ...
www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=115086406 - 15k - Cached - Similar pages "

I swapped "memory" for "CPU", probably the most common mistake. I should have known better, and had I proofread my writing before sending...

Thanks, and Regards,

David Syes

*BSD

[Predius]

I've netbooted an iPaq IA1 using a similar setup, CF to load the kernel (replace with floppy in this scenario) and a USB nic to netboot over. Just using a USB HD also works. As long as you can compile support for the device into the kernel, you should be able to use it as a root file system. Load the kernel, and it'll handle the rest.

Re:*BSD

[Predius]

Forgot to mention, but I'm near 100% positive this works just the same on the linux side of the fence as well. For extra fun, you can actually boot XP over the network from a single boot floppy, lots of time to setup though.

power saving question

[Anonymous Coward]

Not directly related, but nevertheless along the same lines: several people have mentioned that the USB memory stick will use less power than a hard drive. My question is, if this is true, why isn't there a filesystem that can store things both on the hard disk and in flash memory and try to optimize things so that the hard disk could be left off most of the time? With a 512MB or 1GB flash memory storing a read AND write cache that persists across reboots, you could pretty much leave the hard disk off 99% of the time. Seems like this could save you a serious amount of battery power.

The question is, is there a filesystem around that can actually do this? Mirroring won't work because the hard disk and flash will be different sizes, and the RAID software wants to write everything to both volumes. Cachefs from Solaris could almost work, except that it wants to do write back of the cache frequently, so it would only be good for read-only access. I believe there are some filesystems that are capable of spreading themselves across multiple partitions, and maybe one of those could work, but there would need to be a way to tell it to migrate commonly-used files to the flash partition. Is there such a beast, or would a new filesystem have to be written?

what i'm using

[feelyoda]

for a bot which will be moving too fast for a mechanical drive:
Sandisk 2GB CF
http://store.yahoo.com/memorysuppliers/sa2gb20 cofl m.html

It has a fairly fast write time.

What I really wanted was this, but the company sucks:
Pretec 6Gb, 12+Mb/s sustained write speeds
http://www.expansys.com.au/product.asp?cod e=113572

ONLY $6,361.45!

Just To Clarify

[ryewell]

I hope I can clarify a few things about this question (I submitted it...) 1) My goal was to have the OS load completely into ram, and use the ram for any swap file/OS use, thus the flash card would not be constantly read/write. 2) Hard drives really suck the juice out of a battery. This may sound obvious but taking the hard drive out has more than tripled my laptop's usage on one charge, which was another reason I wanted to try the USB option. 3) When people quote prices of things, they need to also consider taxes, shipping costs, insurance, and the DOA/shoddiness factor, just because there is a hard drive on ebay or some other second hand place doesn't mean it's a perfectly working hard drive, and just because you can buy a $20 hard drive doesn't necessarily mean it's even compatible. Thanks for all the input, ry

USB 1 is gonna be slooooow

[darnok]

If you're trying to access a full distro over USB 1, it's gonna be pretty slow. As many others have pointed out, I'd look at replacing your hard disc as an option if at all possible.

Write limit?

[Barlo_Mung_42]

This sounds like a neat idea but how soon will the flash memory reach it's write limit? Isn't in the order of a million writes or so?

Just some off the cuff theorizing but I would assume the OS would do lots of writes to certain system files and that limit would be reached in a matter of weeks.

SLAX on usb

[monopole]

My coworker just had this problem recently on his Thinkpad 41. We were able to rig a USB CF reader a 256 MB CF card and a copy of SLAX (live slackware in a 180 MB iso for 3.5" CDs) to generate a very usable interim system. With a 1 GB USB drive, it should be possible to mount a solid state version of Knoppix. Very nice!

Re:SLAX on usb

[Anonymous Coward]

USB 1.1's speed ain't so hot, do you find the system slugish?

simplest solution:

[Trashman]

Dude, just buy another HD. They're not expensive anymore shop around on Ebay or Froogle or pricewatch or price. Why complicate matters with USB and flashdrives?

Hell I have the orignal 6 gig from my TP 600 you want it? You pay the shipping.

linux w/o hard drive

[nukka]

the other week i got my hands on a hp thinstation. it has 1gig tm proc, 256mb ram, and 192mb flash drive on it. since constantly writing to flash is a bad idea i setup the system as follows: boots from flash w/ 2 options. i setup a small, very stripped slackware distro on the flash that mounts /var/log and /tmp in 2 ramdisks that are 64mb each. the other option is boots, but uses a custom initrd i setup that mounts everything over nfs and boots a full distro. i use the mini system for a small box to plug into networks for troubleshooting, etc and i use the nfs distro for home use. it is a little slow if you try to boot x.org, but i never do so its fine. you may want to set something like this up on your floppy. you would just need a supported usb key 128-512mb to put all of the os stuff on and the floppy to boot from. also, you may want to look into pxe booting an image onto it. i had to use pxe to boot the slackware install on the box since it has so cdrom or floppy...good luck

It's actually a stolen thinkpad

[Anonymous Coward]

The poster has come upon a stolen thinkpad, or a thinkpad where the built in boot password has been lost. Without the password, the BIOS won't boot the drive.

That password is stored in an eeprom in the TP, and is also pushed into firmware on (many) IBM-qualified drives. So, you cant take a stolen drive and boot it either without that drives password in additon to any local boot password.

That is also why the poster doesn't just go out and buy a used drive for $15 off of ebay and slap it in... the drive would still be 'broken'.

So, the poster is hoping that we'll provide them with an alternative to make the thinkpad useable.

The answer is to use knoppix on a usb drive and be done with it.

Re:It's actually a stolen thinkpad

[mabu]

mod this up.. he's right.

Re:It's actually a stolen thinkpad

[ryewell]

Sorry, but this isn't the case. I bought the laptop of Ubid 4 years ago for $400. It ain't stolen.

Re:It's actually a stolen thinkpad

[jerzee_devil]

With a supervisor password in place it would not boot from any drive...... hard/cd/or floppy It would show the thinkpad screen go blank and ask for a password.

Too Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop being so cheap and buy a new notebook. Go to your local college or university. People are always unloading computers at decent prices.

Seriously guy, you're like an uber penny pincher or something.

Less trouble to get a cheap HDD

[jthorpe]

About two years ago, I was given an old TI Extensa 900CDT notebook (P133, 32Mb of RAM) by a friend which had a dead HDD, no CD and only a floppy drive. There were no USB ports.

Since this laptop didn't have any USB ports and only two PCMCIA ports, the first thing I decided to do was to make a Linux boot floppy containing the PCMCIA drivers and the cardmgr daemon. I then created an LFS-type distro on a 512Mb CF card (used for other purposes, but I had it spare). I found this to be incredibly slow and not suitable for running a fully-fledged X environment (even with the minimalist of mimimalist WMs).

I eventually aquired a CardBus USB adapter which would offer greater speed, permitting me to attach an external USB 2.0 HDD to the laptop.

I tried for no less than 6 months to get this working - there were issues with the CardBus controller being assigned IRQs under Linux, which was a real problem and a brick wall.

I eventually tried a few solutions that permit the use of USB HDDs to operate in a pure DOS Environment. Surprisingly, these solutions (there was DUSE and another from Panasonic) which actually worked on this laptop/USB controller/USB HDD configuration.

I wasn't too keen on using DOS, so I managed to build a FreeDOS boot disk that contained the necessary USB stack (with storage), loadlin and the Linux kernel (along with a small, but suitable initial ramdisk). Although I thought that there would be some issues with the DOS USB stack and the Kernel, there surprisingly weren't. This allowed the system to initialise the IRQs and when Linux came to using them (I just had to use some pci=irqmask=xxxx parameters), the USB drive worked.

I was very impressed with getting this working and could even run X apps with decent performance (Abiword, xmms etc).

Soon after I achieved this, I was at a swap meet and bought (I wasn't even looking for one!) a 2.1Gb 2.5" HDD for AUD $30, still in the original packaging (obviously old stock). I installed it, and that's what it has been running since.

My advice to the author of the article is that be prepared to make a project of this. If you don't have the time and want a quick fix, look for a cheap 1-4.5Gb HDD. Avoid anything over 8Gb if you can because the older BIOSes may be problematic (although that said, there was a pre-OS program that I could run to get a 10Gb HDD working on mine).

Forget the floppy

[jfdawes]

Why not try to find out how hard it's going to be to boot from the USB device?

(And another reason to forget the floppy: CD)

Other uses for this setup

[headkase]

It would be nice from a computer repair point of view to have a setup like this - a boot floppy and the rest of the OS running from a memory stick. You could use this when you go to a site for computer repair, just add your own diagnostic tools to the memory stick. The advantage this has over burning your own custom cd with Knoppix as a base is that you can write files to the memory stick if all you can do is salvage files before a reformat.
Food for thought, what diagnostic/essential programs would you use with a setup such as this?

Don't run off the flash; read it into a ramdisk

[RGRistroph]

First, I would like to suggest you may not be going all that wrong using DOS. I know someone who has carefully stripped out the help files from WP5.1 and has a DRDOS 7.03 floppy that will boot up, copying everying into a ramdisk so you can use the floppy, and has enough room to save files, and it has all the common printer drivers on it also. You can put your assignment on this floppy, take it to school, and do last minute editting and print it out on any computer connected to a printer.

However, if you really want all that linux has to offer (maybe browsing the web in coffeeshops, etc) then the way to do it is to have a floppy that boots up doesn't mount the flash disk to run from it, but just to read an image to put into a ram disk; then it runs from the ramdisk. The flash is too slow and may have a limited number of writes.

I did something similar that you might use as a starting point, a linux version of the old laplink boot disks. The first thing you would do is add the USB drivers to the kernel; the next would be to make it mount the flash drive, make a ram drive, and decompress an image onto the ram drive. You would put those commands in the linuxrc file. Compile the kernel to have a larger default ram drive size, and then use it by just accessing /dev/ram0.

If that boots, see if you can copy parts of the 2 floppy X windows setup, and add links for web browsing and if you have to go beyond MC for writing, try abiword.

I would be interested to hear what you figure out on this. Even if you don't complete the project, but get something that partially boots, or anything at all, feel free to send me an email.

Related question...

[strags]

I have an ancient laptop with a broken keyboard. The HD/FD are both fine, as are the PCMCIA slots. No CDROM.

What I would like to do is boot a single-diskette that contains enough code to fire up the PCMCIA networking, and either ENBD or something like it.

That way, I could mount the HD in the laptop as a remote block device, and copy an OS across.

Any ideas?

Re:Related question...

[proxima]

Take out the laptop hard drive, buy yourself a $5 desktop IDE to laptop IDE converter, and install it from any computer you'd like.

Re:Related question...

[Bunyip Redgum]

If it has a serial port, just use openbsd. The boot floppy supports headless installs.

Help me with my old car!

[realmolo]

See, I've got this old Chevy Nova. It runs fine and everything, but it's out of gas. Does anyone know of a way I could hook it up to my wood-burning stove?

This way I would save on gas money. Have you seen how much gas is?

/sarcasm

Buy a new hard drive, you cheap motherfucker.

Re:Help me with my old car!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now how the &%^%^% does flamebait get a karma bonus modifier of 1, (making it +1 total?) That's effed up.

Junk on ebay

[poptones]

What you will find for $15-$30 (in 2.5" form factor) are absolute junk drives that may or may not be guaranteed to "format in DOS" - which says nothing of what they may do once formatted and you try to put data on them.

I buy lots of laptop stuff on ebay and I rebuild IBM lappys as a hobby. Back when I first started doing this I looked at the price of brand new, fully warranteed drives and decided to just buy a few cheap used ones. Of the three I bought (for a total of more than $100) I have zero functional units less than six months later. The first one (Sony - I should have known) accepted a format and then started clicking a week later, the second (Fujitsu) lasted a couple of months. The genuine IBM drive lasted almost four months before it, too, started clicking one day while at the library - just as I was about to complete a 4GB ISO download.

From then on I buy "expensive" new drives with warranties. Spending $100 on a new drive every couple of years makes a hell of a lot more sense than spending $30 every other month on JUNK.

Speaking more directly to the topic, my latest pet is a 500MHz 600 that is being fitted with a custom case and battery pack and internal USB hub and wireless. It will have only one external PCMCIA slot because the other will be permanently occupied by a USB2 card (which will, in turn, talk to the internal wireless USB dongle and USB 10/100 NIC) - but I will be able to refit my machine to a speedy 750MHz or more at my leisure, spare parts are dirt cheap, and I won't have to be a slave to the $60 semi-annual Lithium toss, instead just replacing NiMH cells as they expire.

And the way I'm making room for much of this is by replacing the $80 20GB 2.5" drive with a cool new $110 20GB 1.8" drive. Just a few slight internal adjustments and my one-off geekpad will become the one to rule the world via USB!

Re:Junk on ebay

[Halfbaked Plan]

I've had excellent luck with small 2.5" hard drives on eBay. I maintain a small collection of older 486 laptops and a 2 gig drive is perfect for such a machine.

I use a Toshiba 486-100 machine with a wireless card in it to browse the web away from the machine room, i.e. on the back porch. It's a good little system.

Re:Junk on ebay

[cpthowdy]

Any chance you know of any good [working] batteries for a Thinkpad 390?

If you would be so kind, please email me:

mikedderuki@yahoo.com

Re:Junk on ebay

[peragrin]

Funny I bought a used 6 gig drive for $50, and haven't had a problem. Then again I do know someone who did the same and it is toast now, then again this guy also has a tendacy to throw the laptop across the room when windows hangs.

I would switch him but he ain't smart enough to use Linux, and to cheap to buy a Mac. Nope this guy gets second rate equipment only.

Re:Junk on ebay

[NETHED]

What OS are you using? I have a similar Laptop that i would want to turn into an internet station.

Re:Junk on ebay

[AgBullet]

brand me a n00b but what exactly does it mean (physically) when a harddisk starts clicking? i've had laptop disks click away at alarming volume and speed.

/starting to feel paranoid now...

Re:Junk on ebay

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry but 2gb laptop drives off ebay are more reliable than a new 40 gig from your local computer store.

I have a fleet of over 100 laptops at work, the old laptops from 3 years ago with 2->4gb drives never gave us trouble and were in service for over 5 years. the newer ones that are 3 years old now... I have replaced almost EVERY laptop hard drive (hitachi and IBM... wow no suprises there) with a few exceptions, and those 8 people are warned weekly to be sure to back things up.

newer drives are utter junk compared to drives from just 5 years ago.

Re:Junk on ebay

[Daengbo]

You should look into using it with LTSP and PXE boot. You can then forget about the hard drive altogether.

Re:Junk on ebay

[Anonymous Coward]

The clicks you hear are the heads seeking. Older hard drives have noisier seeks than new ones. That sort of clicking is fine.

However, what you have to watch out for is a CHANGE in the clicking.

When a drive starts to go bad, it starts to have problems reading and writing. At first, the drive can compensate for the errors and your data is still readable. There's some redundancy in the data (ECC) that lets it correct small errors without rereading. Bigger errors are harder to deal with. The process goes like this: when the drive detects an error it recalibrates itself by seeking the heads all the way to the beginning of the disk and then seeks back to the data and tries again. It repeats until it either succeeds or it exceeds a predetermined number of retries and gives up. If it gives up, it notifies the computer that there's an error. On modern drives, the hard drive has a certain amount of spare sectors set aside, and when there's an error, it physically copies the problem sector to one of the spares. The process is invisible to the computer (ignoring special monitoring software). The problem is that the number of errors grows over time. Eventually, the drive will run out of these spare sectors. Since the spare sectors could be anywhere on the disk, they generate more seeks. So, seeing errors on a disk is bad because it means that none of the above could fix it.

Sometimes, the drive will "chirp" or "buzz" because of the numerous retries and extra seeks. You'll start to see these little pauses as the computer waits for the drive. Even worse is "clickety clickety" coupled with the computer "hesitating". That last one means the end is near.

If your hard drive starts doing any of the above, STOP USING IT IMMEDIATELY. It's a ticking time bomb. The only time you should ever power it up again is to get the data off of it.

Boot to USB?

[Barlo_Mung_42]

If it's USB 2 can you make the thumb drive itself bootable?

Re:Boot to USB?

[smcavoy]

it is possible to boot via usb only with systems that have support in their BIOS. This would not be the case here.
"I have an IBM Thinkpad 390 Laptop, PII 266Mhz, 128 MB RAM, with USB 1.0 port and a 3.5 floppy"

If it was me

[np_bernstein]

I'd go with knoppix (via usb cdrom if there's not cd) and use NFS/usb to save docs & keep personal settings. Heck, you could probably even get a usb HD and be good to go.

menuet

[mcovey]

Google up "Menuet OS" 32-bit assembly graphical OS with internet capabilities. Not sure about progs included, but it does have irc.

microdrives etc

[EvilAlien]

How about this? Faster than glacial, at least.

MPIO HS100 1.5GB HDD Portable Storage

Plug and play! Carry large data wherever you go. HS100 is a moderately priced mobile digital audio and video consumer product from Digitalway. HS100 is a 1.5 GB portable USB Mass Storage installed with 1-inch HDD. It is a combination of huge capacity HDD and small flash memory storage device. It is capable of fast data transmission by using the USB 2.0 Interface.

eMachines M6805

[Bad Boy Marty]

Hell, I'd be happy if I could find a Linux distribution that I could install on my 6-month old AMD Athlon 64 laptop. Just what is it those folks at RedHat do, anyway?

Get a cool hard drive

[SoBeKing]

Sure this isn't all that practical price wise but it would sure be cool to have with you and the portability factor is an added bonus. So be sure to check out the usb hard drive on thinkgeek:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/dri ves/5ad4/

Dear Slashdot.

[Rick the Red]

I found a bunch of 486s in a dumpster. How can I build one of those Beowolf thingies?

Can we get a little more info on your intended use

[Gldm]

I'm just wondering if this laptop is used in a portable, carry around with me manner, or if it's one of those laptops that says plugged into AC 99% of the time doing word processing.

If it's the latter, do you have a network and at least one other machine? If so, how about a TFTP and network boot? I'm not sure if you have a boot rom in your laptop but it's possible or maybe you could find a cheap network card for it with one. Once the laptop's booted up it should be fine as long as it stays attatched to whatever network FS it needs to read files off of.

I assume your bios does not allow boot from usb, so that's kinda out... Again, if it's a "static" laptop, one option might be a 44->40 pin IDE adapter, run the wire out of the case, and hook it to a standard 3.5" HD and use an old AT powersupply to keep it spinning. I'm just trying to think up ways to fix this thing with the typical "junk" around the average geek's house. I know there's usually half a ton of old cables, drives, cpus, cards etc in mine. If you're working on the premise that $130 is too much to spend I'd suspect that digging for junk or getting it from a friend may be an option in your case.

Not practical

[Anonymous Coward]

Its a novel idea, but bite the bullet and get a new (or used) hard drive.

Re:Go buy a replacement hard drive.

[mabu]

I suspect he doesn't know the boot password, which is why he wants to run the thing without a hard drive.

New Thinkpad 390 $50 EBay, or $30-75 disk

[billstewart]

OK, it only has a 6GB disk in it, so you might rather spend the money on a new 20GB disk for $50-75 on EBay, or a smaller disk for ~$30. Or you could spend $75 on a DVD/CD drive on EBay and run Knoppix, with your current USB stick as a home directory :-) You can also get a PCMCIA hard drive (eBay prices look like $20 for Viper 340MB), but I don't think those are bootable so you'd probably need to boot from floppy - think of it as a cheap slow USB stick :-)

Yes, the article said the best deal the guy could find was ~$130. The guy wasn't looking anywhere near hard enough. He didn't say that he currently _had_ a memory stick, but the price of 256MB of flash in whatever format is pretty similar to lower-priced 20GB disks, and 40GB disk is similar to 512MB flash. There are some Linux distros that'll do fine in 128MB (for small values of "fine", but that seems to be ok for this guy.)

Re:New Thinkpad 390 $50 EBay, or $30-75 disk

[dgatwood]

FWIW, I used to run a linux router whose entire OS and all needed utilities were entirely on a floppy disk. Of course, that was with binaries statically linked (no shared libs or ld.so) and no shell, but....

But seriously, the way to solve the posted problem to put only the boot loader and compressed kernel (make bzImage or whatever) on a floppy and set the root partition to be on the flash drive. Make sure you compile enough USB and mass storage support into the kernel. It should be rather easy to get it working, but it will require access to a working Linux box with a floppy drive to get you started.

Re:BSD Laptops w/Gorgeous Babes!

[StarKruzr]

Eh I dunno about that. I've heard Ceren kinda blew up like a balloon recently. Merc's pretty cute.

Here's an actual useful answer for your query

[nmoog]

I hope you recheck this posts to get this, because wow what a shit response you got from slashdotters! I have been trying to do the same thing for the last week or so and have found some good resources. Wierd that all the slashdotters say is "get hard drive". Yeah, thanks for that one!

One of the best resources I've found so far is over at damnsmalllinux.org (in the forum, here they have a pretty good how-to on this. I also found a really good discussion of it in the Gentoo forums somewhere, but I forgot to sync my firefox bookmarks today, so I don't have it.

For the project Im working on I can't use a hard drive, but Ive got heaps of memory - so Im just going to use ramdisk for swap space and stuff. That gets around the trashing your key thing. Probably not an option for an old lappy though! Good luck!

Re:Here's an actual useful answer for your query

[euxneks]

Wierd that all the slashdotters say is "get hard drive".

I believe you've tapped the obligatory response of pretty much all linux fuckwads from whom you go to ask help. I'm not saying that all linux people that help are fuckwads, just that some people that offer help are fuckwads.

For instance, asking a question like:
"Hi, I'm trying to compile and install prog1 and I get this error, can I get some help on this?"
Fuckwad response: "prog1 sucks. Use prog2. It's better"
Great pile of fucking help there buddy, glad you offered that up.

I tend to ignore those responses just because a lot of linux "helpers" tend to be crazy fanatics who like the CLI interface of some obscure program over some easy to use KDE gui frontend for another program. *note* This is after trying to install several hundred different programs all being professedly "better" than what I wanted to install and finding out that it has a huge lame ass learning curve with an obscure syntax - screw that man! Hey, maybe CLI's are better/faster/make your dick bigger, but I gotta work it in slowly.

Re:Here's an actual useful answer for your query

[rollie_tyler]

Wait a minute. You're going to put swap on a RAM disk? I'm hoping that's a typo, and you really meant that you're going to put /tmp on a RAM disk. Just in case that's not a typo, though, here's why it's a bad idea:

Swap space is used by the kernel to temporarily store stuff when it runs out of memory. It is usually placed on a disk, which has the advantage of being much larger than your memory, but much slower. So, you gain extra "virtual" memory at the expense of speed.

What you're proposing to do is take away some of your "real" memory, use it as a disk instead, and store your "virtual" memory on it. You're taking memory, making it pretend to be a disk, which then pretends to be memory again. You're not gaining anything, and are probably actually slowing down your system a bit due to the overhead of swapping between the two areas of memory.

In a situation like this, the solution is to not use swap at all. That way all your memory stays as "real" memory and Linux has full use of it.

A few new story ideas!

[brundlefly]

from the i-r-teh-cheapest-mutha-fucka-evah dept.

The power cord on my laptop just went fashizzle and I was wondering if anyone here could give me some advice how to run MacOS X on the digital clock on my Google shwag pen. I am hoping to spend no more than $.10 on parts for this. Oh, and I'd like to boot it remotely from my wireless MP3 server. Thanks in advance!

Re:A few new story ideas!

[Anonymous Coward]

here's a diagram on how to get *nix on that clock of yours.

two ideas:

[skymester]

Idea one: use knoppix, you can boot it from cd and use an usb-stick to store your homedir.

Idea two: buy a harddrive. A 20 Gig HD is probably the same price as a 1 Gig usb-stick.

Dell Financial Services...used Latitudes...Knoppix

[muddy_mudskipper]

i am typing this on a Dell Latitude C500 that i took the HDD out of and bought a new battery for.

running KNoppix-STD off a 64Meg USB stick, with Firefox .9 right off the stick.

also, the battery runs for about 4 hours without having to provide current to spin the drive platters...

check them out on ebay; you will be able to pay for your purchase with a credit card on a Dell site:

http://cgi6.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewSeller sO therItems&userid=dell_financial_services&include=0 &since=-1&sort=3&rows=50

CF to 2.5" IDE adapter

[OrangeTide]

You can get a simple 2.5" IDE to CompactFlash Type I (or II) adapter for cheap ($25). You could just buy a used 2.5" drive that works ($40). Or you could buy a used laptop that works ($300).

If your goal was to waste your time, then you've succeeded beyond all your expectations. You've not only wasted your time, but you've wasted mine.

Two questions:

[NerveGas]

For the person who submitted the question: Why wouldn't it be possible?

For the /. monkey who approved the story: Why, oh why, do you need to post useless questions like this, to which the simple answer is "yes"? Has /. become every lazy newbie's HOWTO?

steve

This is asinine

[thedillybar]

If you value your time at anything more than about $0.50/hr, you'll find that the least expensive route is to buy a new harddrive.

You're going to have cost for materials anyway, maybe not quite as much, but still a substantial cost.

Re:Puppy Linux allows you to boot off of a usb car

[SHEENmaster]

BIOS must support booting from USB, which is unlikely in an early Pentium.

feather linux

[zogger]

I have that one here,it's a live or installable distro, knoppix remaster, total 64 megs, and it's a dang nice more or less complete desktop. The oldest/slowest box I have run it on is a computer I just gave away to a nieghbor kid today, a 166 with 32 megs ram,it booted just fine, faster than the 98se that is on the hard drive in fact.

Re:feather linux

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Cool. I installed a version of Knoppix on a P166/128MB/1.2GB HDD some time ago, and it runs quite nicely (although I spent an evening trimming down the packages to fit on that small HDD)

DSL and USB

[Anonymous Coward]

Use DSL Damn Small Linux and you can put a live distro onto a USB key. (I hav't done this yet but I heard from a reliable source)

USB 1.0

[Mostly a lurker]

Lots have commented on the slow write performance of the memory stick. An even more pertinent issue is that all I/O through USB 1.0 (presumably this is USB 1.1) will be slow.

Like others, I think a key question is whether there is an operational CD drive. If so, it would seem sensible to boot Knoppix from that and only use a memory stick for backup purposes.

Yup.

[StarKruzr]

I have not heard of a USB drive that was not a flash device. Therefore, yes.

Dear Sir,

[StarKruzr]

Very carefully.

Sincerely,
A Concerned Slashdot Reader

Re:Puppy Linux allows you to boot off of a usb car

[nuzoo]

No problem, Puppy Linux also allows you to boot off of a floppy, then run everything from the USB flash drive.

Been there done that....

[NoMercy]

My laptop's hardisc died, my life ran though it sitting beside my main PC handling all my corrisponance bar email, MSN/IRC/etc though which I run my clan and numerious more professional cotacts

And then it died (well kinda my own fault I thought I'd 'fix' the slightly flaky hardisc and eded up with a dead system).. but ignoring my own stupitidy onto what I did...

I started by replacing the CD drive with a floppy drive, not to dificult, for some reason it would fail to boot from CD but would floppies, and it booted, victory 1!... I then proceded to get the network working from boot, Victory 2!.. I then proceded to pull my hair out as my luck had run out, I had no source of a stable root filing system and went down the lane searching for remote NFS roots in PCMCIA systems, it took me quite a while until I found one very nasty niggle, without hacking your kernel (which for the love of me I couln't work out how to modify the kernel init order) as PCMCIA network support is started after the NFS root code...

Fire up the system without specifing NFS root... works and network comes up

Fire up system with specifing NFS root.. system dies and never gets to PCMCIA init ... I solved this problem by spending $120 on a new hardisc.

There is a chance you can get the system working from USB, I'd recomend you use a initrd and then mount the USB drive, but if you want my honist opinion either buy a new laptop, or by a new hardisc depending on how many more years you want to use it.

Cf adapter + microdrive

[Richard_J_N]

If you can get hold of one, you could use an IBM microdrive with a CF adapter. This behaves exactly like an IDE disk. The advantage compared to flash is that you won't wear it out with multiple writes eg swap.

Another one...

[SilentT]

Another similar distro is Feather Linux. And for the google-challenged, here are the links to damn small linux and dynebolic: DSL, dynebolic.

tclDisk

[clasher]

I love oppurtunities to push my little floppy distro tclDisk or my older, though still applicable, linux floppy howto. Both are pretty barebones but give a starting point for creating more advanced systems.

I run Linux on a 390

[jerzee_devil]

From your question it didn't seem like you would be interested in something as extravagant as audio support but... getting the sound to work on a 390 is not easy. The 390e and 390x are a piece of cake though. (Yes I have them all) I just bought a new drive for my 390x for much less than $120 at Newegg. It was a 40gig Toshiba for $85 I think. You may want to try there. Also I have never seen a 390 with out a cd drive. Maybe yours is different but every one I have ever seen has an optical and floppy combo. The cd one can be picked up cheap on e-bay and open up a whole new realm of cd based distros to you. Good Luck.

$130???

[DamienMcKenna]

If the laptop is that old why are you spending top dollar to get a new HD? My father-in-law got a 10gig one for $80 two years ago, surely you can do better?

Damien

Firewire Debian

[thomas536]

Over the past many months I worked on a personal project to get a Dell laptop to essentially boot off of an external firewire hard drive. I created a boot cd (because it wouldn't boot directly from the drive) that would boot up and load appropriate "stuff". The goal of the project was to have a full, apt-getable, customizable Debian distribution running off of the drive, including mounting the firewire drive as root, not using a ramdisk (as knoppix), and (re)loading the kernel from the drive as well.

Damn Small Linux...

[smurfnsanta]

DSL has been doing this since at least 0.6.x. See: DSL USB + Floppy ~ 50 Mg and change the /dev/hda3 entries to /dev/sdaX, whatever your USB block device is recognized as. From damnsmalllinux.org, see the save settings to HD, and again use the USB instead. Rather amazing what they include on just 50 megs, and all apps are light weight enough you may actually get some work done.

Digital Resistance ina babylon world

[solferino]

Thanks for the headsup on dyne:bolic. Enjoyed reading this part of their little intro -

dyne:bolic is RASTA software released free under the GNU General Public License.
This software is about Digital Resistance ina babylon world which tries to control and make a business out of the way we communicate, we share our interests, informations and knowledge.
The roots of the Rastafari movement are in resistance to slavery: this software is one step in the larger struggle for Redemption and Freedom from proprietary and closed-source software.
Much blessings in Jah luv to all those who resist. Selah.

RMS as a rastafarian prophet? Now it all makes sense.

Lets face it...

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy is looking for problems to solve. Its certainly interesting as a parlor trick, but certainly not something that is practical.

a viable diskless alternative?

[opos]

Sun has tried several times to build diskless workstations such that your personal config followed you from box to box. It never took off, in my opinion, because server failure put you out of business. But any of the high capacity solid state stores, CF, memory sticks etc - provide the option for you to carry your config, and critical documents around with you - plug into a true diskless station and pick up where you left off.

This laptop question just might be a good test bed to test this concept.

Booting Sparcstation IPX

[Anonymous Coward]

While we're on the topic of booting options. Can anyone recommend a way to boot Sparcstation IPX from something other than a HD. I absolutely love the little thing as my firewall/router but the old SCSI HD is so unnecessary. I would love to boot it off of a CF or something but I can't find an option that would work. I don't know of SCSI to CF adapters and it doesn't have USB. Any thoughts?

Re:Booting Sparcstation IPX

[kcurrie]

It's a Sun box! Boot it off the NETWORK via it's PROM!
Google on "boot net" and probably IPX and you should turn up a ton of links.

Of course, having a box that boots via tftp/rarpd as your firewall obviously leaves you open to a variety of issues if your firewall crashes and reboots :-)

Flash cards have limits and problems

[Anonymous Coward]

You would probably not be reliably able to run a regular distrofrom a flash memory device for a long time. Flash memory has a limit to how many times it can be overwritten. A Linux system has caches and logs and swap files that are written to, and sooner or later the flash device will begin to fail. I am not sure if any systems have been created that cater to running off of a small system with a flash memory device in lieu of an hard disk. Anyway, a hard disk is still cheaper than large flash card devices. Sooner or later you'd have to do a daily fsck to find and mark out bad blocks as memory began to fail in your memory card.

New laptop, USB1.1 speeds vs. zero latency

[billstewart]

Somebody's selling a slightly faster Thinkpad 390 on Ebay for $50 :-)

As far as USB1.1 slowness goes, it's a tradeoff - the bus is limited to 12 Mbps, aka 1.5MB/sec, which is 8X CD speed, so it's no barn-burner, but there's no disk drive latency either. A typical disk read has seek+rotation time somewhere over 5ms on desktop drives, and more like 10-15ms on a laptop drive, so if you transfer 15KB of data at 10MB/sec, that's at least 6.5ms or 11.5 or 16.5 . On the USB drive, it'll take you about 10ms. If you're doing big reads, then yeah, the hard drive wins, but if you're doing small fragmented reads, the USB is faster. So programs may take a few seconds to start up, but once they're running, they're mostly running pretty fast.

Feather Linux booted off of USB... here's how...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wrote a quick howto on how to setup feather linux to boot off a usb drive (~$130 CAD for 512MB):

http://www.northern.ca/forums/index.php?t=msg&th=1 14

It uses freedos, I imagine if your lappy doesn't support booting from USB (and if freedos has USB drivers) you could boot via a floppy first and then start it up using the above.

So, you don't have to re-write the fs image often

[JSBiff]

I don't see this as being a major problem as long as you are aware of the issue. Seems like it should be possible to put all the system logs, etc, into ram drives. As far as most of the linux system files that you need to load and run apps, they don't need to be written to - just read. Heck, you could maybe partition your flash drive (do memory sticks allow partitioning?) into a read only file-system partition, and a read-write data area for docs and such.

The only hurdle I see to this is that you don't have any swap partition or file. Which is a bit of a drawback, but it should be perfectly possible to run a small linux distro with no swap.

As a case in point - Knoppix loads and runs off a CD - which generally you aren't going to be writing to at all once you've burned the Knoppix image on it. Actually, Knoppix might be an excellent starting point for the person trying to do this - Knoppix devs have already solved a lot of the problems of loading a Linux system from read-only media with no swap.

TFH Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Man with only one floppy this has to be the way to
go: http://tinfoilhat.shmoo.com/ Fix the kernel
for usb.

Actually,

[grepistan]

I've got an even older thinkpad (486, no cdrom) and it gets at least 90 minutes from a charge. Possibly because it is so ancient it draws next to no power, I'm not quite sure.

Because I'm lazy and can't be bothered doing an NFS or HTTP install of some proper linux distro on it, I use basic linux , which is somewhat limited but can do a few basic things. There's a collection of these types of things available here if anyone is interested...

Several Options including Puppy

[billstewart]

Hi, Brad - A couple of people have mentioned small distributions, including Puppy Linux, Feather Linux, Peanut Linux, etc. that can fit on a USB, in most cases a now-obsolete 64KB USB. That should let you boot quickly (better with USB2.0, of course) and have the main applications as well as your LAN going.

Puppy is designed to load itself into RAMdisk and not need to run from the boot media - I don't know for sure if that lets the hard drives or CDROM shut down, but you can probably tweak the Power Management utilities to make that happen. The LiveCD is about 50MB, so it won't take long to download.

Backpack CD ROM

[Andrewkov]

You could get one of those backpack USB CD ROM drives and run Knoppix off it (you may need a boot floppy if the machine won't boot of the USB drive). And of course you can use the backpack drive on any future machine, so it's not wasted money. Also someone told me those backpack drives are just an interface for a standard IDE drive, so you can take out the CD drive and put in an IDE hard drive and use that via USB. I've been meaning to test this theory since it would be a nice way to rescue data from crashed Windows drives on another PC.

Has anyone considered...

[zhrinze]

Zip drives/disks. The old PPA one worked well, and I'm sure new ones could take advantage of higher capacity disks. It may be higher cost up front, but the ability to replace the disks cheaply makes it a good fit.

Old Laptops - Damn Small Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi there;

It is pretty hard for me to comment on your specific laptop as I'm not familiar with it. AS other have mentioned if the machine is bootable from a CDROM then one of the small live distros may do the Job.

I have an old Gateway with a 133MHz P1 that I keep running with differrent distros simply for the challenge (it is not much good for anything else). The latest distro that I've loaded is Damn Small Linux (DSL) and I'm rather impressed. Now I don't know how difficult it will be to get this distro to run from Flash so I can't reccomend it. Running from Flash creates its own unique problems, what you really need is a distro that is designed to do that. Unfortunately none to reccomend now but DSL would certainly be a good base to start with.

The other thing to look into closely is the PCMCIA slot. See if your BIOS will boot from an ATA device in the PCMCIA slot. If So get yourself two compact flash adapters. Use one as a more or less write once device, that is a place for you /bin stuff, the other would handle read write. Well hopefully if your Adapters & BIOS allow you to do so. CF flash is really the way to go with something like this, and in my opinion is a much better solution that a dongle that may get disconnected at unsavory times. As you noted CF can be had in huge sizes at reasonable costs.

If your BIOS is an issue you may be able to get away with a bootable floppy. Setting this up for optimal performance will not be for the novice. Even here I still think that CF in a PCMCIA adapter makes the most sense though you do have a choice now.

Fortunatly my old laptop still has a funtioning disk drive so I have had to go to the lengths described. To be honest when it gets to that point it is probally retirement time for the machine as just about everything else has issues.

Dave

Don't swap (128 MB RAM)

[RoboProg]

So don't set up a swap partition.

I just installed (updated) Slackware on an old junker 486/100 MHz / 16 MB laptop a few weeks back.

Check out the HOWTO for zipslack. It takes about 100 MB of "disk" space, and you can set up the files using somebody else's DOS/Winders box, if need be. I'm not sure about the USB support, though, as that was not my experience. I just wanted to get a PCMCIA ehternet card working to make a web browser "kiosk" out of the thing. Ufortunately, the poor thing is drinking out of a broadband firehose now, so it works best just to run "xinit", "xhost +..." on it, and set up a window managaer and browser from the machine in the next room, but I digress...

I used zipslack on the "D:" drive, so I could leave the old slackware (1996!) I had on the other file system intact during the tweaking.

USB Hard Drive

[zaphodchak]

You could even get a USB enclosure for a hard drive (standard or laptop) and plug it in like that, for pertty cheap. (Dunno if drivers complications might come up.) Or, just stick the hard drive in the laptop. Also, thumbdrives can go up to about 4 gigs for those endowed with $2,000 or so.

RUNT Linux

[kg4eyf]

This is just the sort of thing RUNT Linux is great for. I don't think you can boot directly from USB, so you can boot the RUNT floppy, and it will run Linux off of the USB drive. RUNT is based on the umsdos filesystem, which is great if you want to use the pen drive for other tasks, but if you want to use it just for linux, you can reformat it with ext3 and copy all the files in. RUNT doesn't come with any graphical environments, but you can easily install the appropriate slackware packages to make it complete to your liking. Check it out!

Joel Ebel
http://www.ncsu.edu/resnet/runt

just get a new hard-drive

[Anonymous Coward]

just get a new hard-drive

Re:BSD Laptops w/Gorgeous Babes!

[Chuck Bucket]

Ceren is soooooooooooooo cute.
you must be blind, or 15. either way, you're dead wrong. take some advice, get out of your parents house more often, and stop wearing so much black.

you'll thank me later.

CB

Re:BSD Laptops w/Gorgeous Babes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Merc's a headcase. And all people who visit that site are too. Just read the guestbook archives.

Re:BSD Laptops w/Gorgeous Babes!

[Anonymous Coward]

What's your fucking problem? You wouldn't recognize a cute girl if you paid $100 for her.

I think the proposal is sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

the poster sounded intelligent, just maybe a little inexperienced. the solution given was very creative and in the (lost) spirit of this site.

ramdisk for swap space? LOL :)

[Anonymous Coward]

You should have disabled swap at all and let the kernel use the ram straight avay (without going through hoops lack-of-ram->swap->ram_disk->ram)

or I'm missing something here?

Mel?

[1u3hr]

DOS boot disk and a program called Mel to do my word processing...

Anyone know what this is? Google searches are swamped by people whose name is "Mel".

Re:Mel?

[kristaps.kaupe]

DOS boot disk and a program called Mel to do my word processing...

Anyone know what this is? Google searches are swamped by people whose name is "Mel".

Yes, I'm wondering too...

I'm still searching for some good free word processing software for DOS.

Re:Mel?

[1u3hr]

I'm still searching for some good free word processing software for DOS.

Perhaps you'd be interested in MS Word DOS 5.5, which MS is offering freely here. I think it was a Y2K upgrade. Very useful, eg if you want to print on a dot matrix, WinWord just can't use printer fonts, insists on using Truetype, which takes 4 times longer -- just save from WinWord as RTF, open in DOS Word, do some quick search-and replace on fonts, print.

But still, would like to know about "Mel".

Re:Mel?

[kristaps.kaupe]

Perhaps you'd be interested in MS Word DOS 5.5, which MS is offering freely here. I think it was a Y2K upgrade.

Thanks, I will check it out. (But I would better like to use non-M$ solution)

Re:Mel?

[kristaps.kaupe]

I mailed to author of this arcticle. Mel is acronym from "Multi-Edit Lite" and it can be downloaded from Free DOS software page. Unfortunatelly, it is simple text editor, not a word processor. (and it's shareware, not freeware) :(

As for free DOS word processors, there is thing called "GalaxyWrite". Still working download link are in an old FreeDOS newsitem. It also mentions program called "AsEasyAs" - spreadsheet for DOS. Can't guarrantee anything, as I don't have tested them yet, but I hope this helps for somebody!

Re: Just for the Challenge?

[Anonymous Coward]

[I made Linux 2.2 (with some basic software) run on 25mhz 486dx with 8 megs of memory just for the challenge of it.]

Which was less of a challenge than underclocking your CPU by 8mhz!

The 25 was a SX, the DX was 33Mhz

486-100?

[poptones]

What does it run? You have some sort of minimal os install and run Mozilla as the shell?

I find a 300+Mhz thinkpad to be an excellent little machine for carrying around work, surfing the net, listening to music, or swapping files - but none of these things at the same time. 366MHz is getting pretty responsive, and 500-700MHz is a damn fine system (sorry, but unless I'm building a portable video workstation I cannot justify a 1GHz+ laptop - even for running gnome 2.6).

But a 486-100? Damn, that's really pushing it.

Re:486-100?

[Halfbaked Plan]

I use Windows 98 on that machine. If I get around to figuring out if the ultra-cheap Wireless card (Microsoft brand, sigh) will work with a freenix I may switch the machine. It works, for text-oriented blogs and news sites, with IE or Mozilla, but best with Opera.

It's impossible to listen to MP3's on such a machine. It's the bare minimum for 'doze 98 as it is.

[Ah've] already Got one - almost

[travelcat]

Well, actually, the Jornada (forget the #) is the spouse's now, but it is a sublaptop, a tad smaller than my Fujitsu P1120, and has no HD - used CF disks for that function. The OS was on a removeable chip, and there was talk of building the chip with Linux instead. Would have been very cool, but never happened. It's quite old now (no real USB support, alas, and doesn't like CF cards bigger than about 24MB) but still going strong.

Alternative ways

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not using a live linux cd, like knoppix (www.knoppix.de) or boot from a floppy and use NFS-root to mount your root filesystem from a server (in read/write of course.)

Re: Just for the Challenge?

[FIGJAM]

I hate people who think they know everything...

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&i e= UTF-8&as_qdr=all&q=486dx-25&btnG=Searc h

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&i e= UTF-8&as_qdr=all&q=486sx-33&btnG=Searc h

Gentoo LiveStick

[chkn0]

The Gentoo Live Stick

Usenet and forums are better places for this

[SpaghettiPattern]

I fail to see the news component in this article. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to make this work and there are dozens of people on Usenet groups and various forums that are more than willing to help you out. Try those for a directer communication.

You also might realize that the time spent on this exercise is probably better invested in playing the harmonica outside your nearest mall. You almost certainly will be able to raise enough money to buy yourself a used PIII.

Re: Just for the Challenge?

[Fizzl]

It is definetely DX.

It used to be an old IBM manufactured PC. I have unfortunately lost the case so I don't know what model it was :(

MOD UP!

[Anonymous Coward]

USB 1.1 is painfully inadequate for this kind of usage. Cute idea, but he'll be dying for a new harddrive once he gets the described setup running.

External hard disk

[fishbot]

Why not just use an external hard disk? In many cases, modern BIOSs can boot from USB media anyway, and this would provide a way to neatly carry about a large amount of data.

I wonder if you could boot off an Archos Jukebox? They are quite well padded for consumer use :)

flonix + GRUB

[guilt]

Hi ryewel, There is a distro based on knoppix called flonix specially designed to fit on an USB memory stick. But your laptop is obviously too old to be able to boot from an USB memory stick. In my opinion the best solution is to use GRUB to boot it from the floppy drive. You can find a tutorial at this URL that explains how to create a floppy disk with GRUB to load the OS on the memory stick.

Why this would be uber cool.

[edunbar93]

One of the really cool things about not having a harddrive in a laptop is that harrdrives suck back power like nothing else on a laptop. Thus, you can effectively double the battery life in the laptop if you could keep your data below the gig or so you can get Flash cards in.

As others point out though, flash is slow even compared to harddrives. But if it means that you can use the thing throughout an 8 hour flight, I'm all for it myself.

Of missing adapters and batteries.

[edunbar93]

I did that once when I was in college and a laptop was useful to me.

I bought an old laptop at a great deal - a 386 with windows 3.11 and office 2.1 (that ancient version of excel did wonders for physics experiments!) installed, all for $50. After tax, shipping, and the exchange rate, it cost me $100 CDN.

The trick was finding an adapter. After scouring the internet, I managed to find a place that would actually sell me one. For about $50 including shipping. The battery was another $50.

Ouch. Not such a great deal after all. Then the motherboard died suddenly after about 6 months use. While I was using it. I've never seen anything like it before or since. Oh well. It's since been replaced by my Cassiopeia A-20 which is actually faster and more stuff, it just fits in my pocket. For large values of pocket.

Try this site

[msim]

I promised i'd use my karma for good, not evil, but smeg it.

go to This site for *ALL* your answers.

Not there!

[KjetilK]

As much as I love tomsrtbt, it has saved my butt many times, it is not the whole answer to the poster's problems. tomsrtbt is first and foremost a rescue system. You'd have to go through a lot of mounting and manually starting the stuff you want up. What he wants is to boot from floppy (and tomsrtbt is not the only distro that does that) and get the rest of the system up from a USB stick. There is quite some work to be done before you get there.

1-floppy linux with X

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there any 1-floppy linux distributions, which include also X-Win with twm? It would be nice to have such a system: linux boots from floppy, loads a wifi module, eth0 gets IP address from dhcp, X starts and you use vncviewer to connect a remote server.

DamnSmall would work out

[Nichotin]

There are several guides out there which shows how to boot DamnSmallLinux from a USB memory stick. The boot process can easily be ported to a floppy, which then reads the rest off the USB stick. DamnSmall is based on knoppix, so any other knoppix based distro should also work out. Example howto (which I followed.): http://www.bootdisk.info/articles.php?action=show& id=13 (you put the boot image on the floppy instead)

wrong url

[Nichotin]

Bleh, the url got fubared: "http://www.bootdisk.info/articles.php?action=show &id=13"

Thinkpad Transnote

[prara]

I have a Thinkpad Transnote with no cd drive. The mobo is choosy and won't boot with other cd drives other than the ones designated by IBM. If you have another PC with a cd drive you can actually create an ftp server and install from that server. Or in a LAN network.

Two Words:

[Anonymous Coward]

Morphix.org!

A live distro that can be put on a cf/usb whatever. If your bios supports it, it'll boot directly. Modularized to fit onto anything between ~64 and 800M. I will treat your device as a read only, so you don't wear it out. /yours truly
Søren Gellert

or you could

[teh Wang]

slap win98 on it, with something like win98lite...

DOM modules

[kennybain]

I like the suggestion about booting from Compact Flash, but the DOM (Disk-On-Module) is probably a better alternative. Do a Google for "disk on module". These usually retail for the same price as CF, but they are 3x's faster and plug directly into either a 40 or 44 pin IDE interface. These still aren't as fast as a hard drive, but they do offer the same benefit of no moving parts & longer battery life.

'Boot off usb via boot floppy, burn off CD' idea

[jago25_98]

I'm still waiting for the

'Boot off usb via boot floppy and burn off a CD'
solution.

Featherlinux has a boot floppy for usb. It can do it but it's not ideal quite yet.

bravo!

[ChrisCampbell47]

Oh my god, that made me laugh harder than anything in a month. Thanks! Useful!

Unfortunately for you, I chose to make this comment rather than mod you up :(

Re:bravo!

[msim]

im sure there's enough karma to burn around here. :-)

yes

[Anonymous Coward]

that would be easy to do with syslinux, linux 2.4 or 2.6, and an initrd.

~jacob@gnu.org

Here's a solution

[stevenm86]

I've thrown together a distro based on knoppix and DSL taht boots off a floppy disk and a 128-meg usb drive. THe floppy contains the kernel and some initrd stuff, while the usb key has the rest of the files. It boots off any usb storage device - flash drive, mp3 player, cf reader, etc.Let me know if you want a copy.

Re:Junk on ebay (OFF TOPIC)

[haledon]

I wanted to email you, but your address is not publicly available. Mine is jyamisha@hotmail.com. I am somewhat of a Thinkpad junkie, and I was curious as to whether you might have a personal web site that talked about how you mounted the internal wireless card, and/or what kind of results you were able to get.

Additionally, I am VERY interested in a custom battery for my Thinkpad T21, which I love. In an ideal world, I'd love getting 8 - 10 hours of battery life out of this thing, using a battery that compliments the form factor.

I'd appreciate it greatly if you emailed me to share any ideas or point me in the right direction.

I guess no one can do it

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares if HD's are cheap. Thats not what was asked.

I'll give you one FREE

[Remlik]

How abou you just give me a mailing address and I send you one of the two old HDD's I have collecting dust beside me?

I have a Seagate 1.4gig and A Fujitsu 1.6gig. Both work. Hell I'll send both in case one fails in a year.

Sorry it doesn't solve your battery problem but at least you won't have to be screwing around with boot floppies and killing flash drives.

Geeze, for 130 bucks on Ebay you could probably buy and entire laptop which contains a 2-4gig HDD and just throw the rest away.

Work smarter not harder.

Replace the drive yourself

[nurb432]

They are cheap.. 100 bucks.. an hour or so of work if you have never done it before, just watch what you take apart and put it back the same way.

Its not THAT hard...

NFS?

[unics]

Easy. Get a boot disk with a small kernel and initrd on two 1.44 disks. Then mount via your network card. You can have a fully functional workstation. This is totally doable.

Take a look at feather linux

[peterle]

it is based on knoppix; comes with boot disk

feather linux

Good thought. However...

[The Tyro]

I suspect he doesn't have a CDROM... many older laptops lack them.

As an example, I just built a mobile internet station for my aging parents to take on vacation with them... salvaged an old Thinkpad 600 to do it. The laptop didn't have a CDROM, though they did have an old Xircom 10Mb network card...so I did a network install of Mandrake 9.2.

Now, they couldn't be happier... reading their email on the road, instant messaging me when we're online at the same time, online banking...

I'm sure scads of people are going to go on and on about how worthless old laptops are, or how they can't do anything without that CDROM. It just takes a little imagination.

None of the above

[Crudely_Indecent]

I wouldn't use any of the above. You're looking at a couple hundred dollars for a 2Gb CF card and the same amount or less for a 40Gb laptop drive.

Get a new drive hoser!

Trinux.. Linux from a boot floppy

[tburt11]

Trinux has been around a long time. (preceeds Knoppix by a long shot)
A complete Linux system that boots from floppy, or even a CD-ROM.
I use it for quick and easy Network sleuthing (boot any windows machine into Linux with network tools).
I use it for cloning hard disks.
Trinux uses a package repository that is hosted on http or ftp, so an internet connection is preferable.

Get a Grip; Dummy Fuck!

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeeez!

As eight out of the first ten posts rightly pointed out, your going to spend the cost of a replacement hard drive for a kludge fix, not that you couldn't drop by a computer salvage yard and accomplish that mission for less than half the price of new. This is not obvious? No, this is Slashdot where you can be instructed to floppy boot linux into a ramdisk image off a usb flash drive... and then... and then.....

Don't you know these guys ENJOY doing this to other people. Hell, they enjoy doing it to THEMSELVES. Your asking for trouble here. Stick to the main roads. Think of your children. For Gods sake man!

Already done

[ripcrd]

I've already tried this with Damnsmall Linux. Get the usbboot.img file and rawrite or dd to a floppy. Copy the knoppix directory from a Damnsmall CD to the root of your memstick. The floppy will boot a basic kernel w/ USB support and hand off control to the memstick. DONE. You can create other directories to hold your files. If you use the features of Damnsmall to save your config to the memstick, it will create a /knoppixhome directory.
Damnsmall is 50MB, so you need probably a 128MB stick.
Damnsmalllinux.org

I HAVE AN EVEN BETTER IDEA!!!!!!!!

[Wakko Warner]

This may or may not be of help to you.

In my spare time, for the past fifteen months, I've been writing my own low-level logic, which can be blown onto an EEPROM chip. The EEPROM chip is then soldered to a project board (Radio Shack P/N 26-117B) along with the necessary connectors and solid-state circuitry to allow you to use the spare (32k) memory in the popular "Speak N Spell" series of educational toys as a CompactFlash device!

With the addition of a CompactFlash-to-USB adapter, one can use this setup just like a regular USB storage device! Think of the Linuxing you can do with that!

- A.P.

Mmh, I guess.

[StarKruzr]

I find it endlessly fascinating how many people can be totally obsessed over a pretty face - and what that does to their behaviour - especially online.

Re:BSD Laptops w/Gorgeous Babes!

[Chuck Bucket]

strong comeback, perhaps you're 16. as for my 'fucking problem', I can see beyond what you see there, I see a girl that needs too much attention for her own self worth. a needy sole like that will never make a good mate. beauty comes from within, and then appears to us; I see no beauty there.

regards,
CB

knoppix cd

[Anonymous Coward]

If only you had a cd-rom drive in that pile of junk. I have a p2-400 mhz laptop where the hard drive bit it and now it sits in my kitchen as a knoppix-powered surfing terminal. Best part of all? I don't have to shut it down nicely EVER. ;-)

Re:Dell Financial Services...used Latitudes...Knop

[Glonoinha]

I'm guessing your laptop has the 'boot from USB device' option in the BIOS? I have been looking for a way to do this with my Latitude CPiA (PII/366) and I don't think it is supported (but am open to suggestions.)

The extra battery life would be nice, but the lack of moving parts would be even nicer.