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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!"
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.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
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.
the no
http://www.toms.net/rb/
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!
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
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.
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.
ResidntGeek
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.
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GCS d-- s+:+ a18 C++ L++ P+ E--- W+++ N+ o K- w--- O---- M+ V-- PS PE Y+
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.
Isaiah 43:19 (NCV)
Look at the new thing I am going to do. It is already happening. Don't you see it?
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.
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.
http://nyamenation.org/
Sounds like something those mandrakemove memory sticks are good for. But that's a knee-jerk reaction without any research whatsoever.
Solutions for pennies.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
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.
Breakfast served all day!
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!
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.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
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.
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?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
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.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
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
...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 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...
Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell
There have been many projects over the years to run Linux on just one floppy disc and within other very tight space/memory requirements.
/ /www.fdlinux.com/
Some examples of Linux distros that do this are:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/byld
http:
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
Push harder towards Open Media/Content
Google is your friend. Check out The Linux Bootable USB Key HOWTO . Particularly the piece about the Flonix Knoppix variant.
\/\/oobie
I've got some 233MHz laptops that works just like wonder.
//hdw
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.
Executive Pope (small) Kallisti Engineering
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.
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.
VKh
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).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
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.
GET THEM INSIDE THE VAULT!
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.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
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.
Nobody's time is free.
.ummmmmmm, no.
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. .
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
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.
Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell
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.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
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.
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.
This was brought to you buy the Department of Redundancy Department
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
Bot Assisted Blogging
My laptop is a 166MHz with 96MB of RAM and a 1.6GB hard drive. Running Debian.
... 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.
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.)
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.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
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.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
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!)
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.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
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.
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.
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?
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?
/sarcasm
This way I would save on gas money. Have you seen how much gas is?
Buy a new hard drive, you cheap motherfucker.
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!
Google up "Menuet OS" 32-bit assembly graphical OS with internet capabilities. Not sure about progs included, but it does have irc.
Amen.
MPIO HS100 1.5GB HDD Portable Storage
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
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.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
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!
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!
You're going to have cost for materials anyway, maybe not quite as much, but still a substantial cost.
BIOS must support booting from USB, which is unlikely in an early Pentium.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
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.
No problem, Puppy Linux also allows you to boot off of a floppy, then run everything from the USB flash drive.
Another similar distro is Feather Linux. And for the google-challenged, here are the links to damn small linux and dynebolic: DSL, dynebolic.
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.
RMS as a rastafarian prophet? Now it all makes sense.
I wrote a quick howto on how to setup feather linux to boot off a usb drive (~$130 CAD for 512MB):
1 14
http://www.northern.ca/forums/index.php?t=msg&th=
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.
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.
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...
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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
The Gentoo Live Stick
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.
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*!
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)
Dvorak on Doomtech
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".
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.
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.
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.
Apple free since 1990!
it is based on knoppix; comes with boot disk
feather linux
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.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
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
free ipod and free gmail!
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!