The challenge: Install Linux on a really old laptop. The catch: It has only 32 MB of RAM, no network ports, no CD-ROM, and the floppy drive makes creaking noises. Is it possible? Yes. Is it easy? No. Is is useful? Maybe...
The only thing I do know is that it has 32 MB of RAM, integrated stereo sound and modem, no network card, and no CDROM drive. When it boots, there is no obvious way to enter the BIOS utility. I tried DEL, F8, etc but I figure it doesn't have one.
I wasted hours trying to do the network boot, which I have done before for the machine running this web server (The DELL DVD drive died long ago). I followed the instructions to put the network boot CDROM onto another Linux server, and installed TFTP and a DHCP server. But the ancient Compaq laptop presented a problem.
Normally you could go to http://rom-o-matic.net/ and make a boot floppy, which will boot up, detect the network interface, and then do a network boot (which would start the Ubuntu installer). However, the only network card I had was a PCMCIA 3com card that is supposed to be supported by rom-o-matic. But no matter what I did, etherboot would not detect it and would just sit there dumbly.
It may have been possible to use the PLIP (IP over parallel port networking) option and boot from over the network using a special cable. But I don't have the cable, and such an install is so uncommon, it would be a miracle if it worked at all.
The minimum memory required for installation is 32 MB, so we are in luck. The problem is that the installer enters a "low memory mode" and doesn't load any kernel modules on its own. Instead, it pops up a list and you have to guess what drivers you are going to need. If you are wrong, you can always click "go back" to back up. I went through the four floppy disks that it asked for, and selected anything that looked like IDE (for the hard drive), 3COM, and PCMCIA (for the network card). Actually, at first I didn't select the IDE components. As a result, the installer offered to partition my floppy disk. I went back to add in the hard disk drivers.
Finally, the installer was working. It connected to the network and downloaded and installed the minimum debian distribution. The only changes I made were to the partitioning. Initially, it offered a 90 MB swap partition. That seems small, so I increased it to 400 MB, leaving 1.3 GB of disk space left over for the install.
When the laptop boots up, I get lots of kernel messages about failed I/O operations. However, once it starts everything is okay. I did a surface check using e2fsck -c but the errors persist.
It turns out that Firefox is a memory pig. It took 15 minutes to start, and it takes up over 100 MB of memory to show a blank window. Ugh!
There isn't a lot of choice of browsers out there. Galeon is part of Gnome, and I definitely didn't want any bloated Gnome packages on my lean but slow machine. Instead, I downloaded the latest version of Opera.
Opera starts in only 10 seconds or so. It's usable, if you don't mind waiting a few seconds between clicks. So Opera wins the browser wars for low-resource machines.
I even tried Lubuntu (a lightweight Ubuntu) but had the same installer issues.
In the end, I used the minimal CD to install a command line system, then used aptitude to install LXDE (a lightweight graphical environment) and the Chromium browser. It seems to work fine for basic web browsing.
Flash barely runs though. :-)
Laptop Which is Windows 95
Suwd
What about Skipstone or NetSurf?
I think they are great. They will probably not crash as much as opera. Once Skipstone crashed, but then I had about 30 windows open on a computer with 64 mb ram. Can you do that in opera?
www.netsurf-browser.org
www.muhri.net/skipstone/
Tho, if you really want a light weight method, next time. Try gentoo ;)
I had done that with netbsd: you can have a network connection through the serial port, i think I had to recompile the kernel of the launch disk to have that.
Once it s installed and running you can reuse that connection to install your software
Germain
Before that I used linux on 486 / 8MB laptop, which was most tricksy, but it worked very well as long as you didn't try to start up X server.. so I used only console and svgalib apps. I used a 19200bps PPP link over a long null modem cable for networking, but even Network File System worked. :)
Compared to those, a "modern" (6 years old) 1500MHz / 512MB laptop is a bliss, because you can throw in a latest distro and not even care what useless stuff it loads to background.
insert the floppy
boot from it
and is says: boot error
tried other floppy no diffrence
floppy works in other laptop
For a micro-ISV, selling to businesses can be more lucrative than selling to consumers. Instead of making a few dollars per sale and hoping for thousands of sales, you sell to only a few customers, and charge much higher rates. But the rates are high for a reason. It takes more time and money to sell to businesses.
Dust off your old Commodore 64, and you could be the coolest kid on the block by plugging SD cards into it instead of floppies.
Rant: Why can't anyone make a good settings screen?
Why don't web pages start as fast as this computer from 1984?