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Installing on old PC
I am not a total newbie, but would call myself a beginner. I am trying to install Linux (not picky which distro) on an old PC which does have a CD drive but will not boot from it. (Please don't tell me to get a newer PC-I have several already-I'm recycling) I finally found an old Slackware cd and managed to install it from floppy. I use LILO so I can boot dos or Slackware of the HD. My original goal was just to create a RS232 terminal to use in developing code for a microcontroller. (The ucontroller's output is RS232.) Anyway, I would like to install a newer distro, It seems that I should be able to do this since the existing linux can access the CD drive (as can the Slackware bootdisk). Can anybody walk me through this?
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The download page for Puppy is at this link: http://www.puppylinux.com/install.htm (The link also has other installation instructions you may or may not be interested in looking at).
A good link for the instructions on how to setup and boot Puppy fromiso is here:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=8674
This thread is a few years old, but the instructions still work. Just remember that back then the name of the Puppy iso file was puppy-2.00-seamonkey.iso. If you follow the instructions, just remember to replace that with the name of the new Puppy iso, which is pup-431.iso.
FYI, Puppy Linux loads entirely into RAM, so, it runs fast, even on an old pc.
Hope this helps. If it's not what your looking for, let us know.
I would like to know what would be the best starter window based linux to use as I've never used it before.
The openSUSE wiki http://en.opensuse.org/Installation_without_CD has some useful information.
Seems the first step should be to get lilo to boot a live distro from a CD. How do I set up lilo to do this? Does it know how to control a CDROM? Maybe I'm missing something obvious?
I have previously tried GRUB-which did not work. Then I tried PLOP, which was a FLOP. It hung up and I had to reboot, fortunately the MBR was still intact.
Just don't look for anything fancy when you have minimal resouces available.
The only other option is for you to install a distro that has no window manager and runs in Command Line Mode, which means that you can't use apps like firefox or anything Graphical User Interface based. But in CLI mode you can use links or lynx to access the internet in a text based browser.
For this you will need
1. be able to boot from a linux system (it can be a live system)
2. a sufficiently big partition to hold the slackware*.iso file and to extract it
to a directory in that same partition
3. a boot loader installed on your hard drive (such as grub)
4. and 2 empty partitions for installing slackware (one for the linux system and
a smaller one for the swap)
If you meet these requirements then you can read this page where I describe how
I did it from my hard drive. I explained it for grub. For other boot loaders (eg lilo)
you'll need to adapt ...
http://vonbiber.x10hosting.com/slackware/nocd/index.html
The general recommendation for a swap partition is to make it 2X the amount of RAM installed, however with your current amount of memory I would recommend setting up a 2G swap partition.
You must remember that your hard drives are much slower than RAM chips, even though with swap you may be able to run many things, the performance will be highly degraded compared to running the same apps from RAM.
Sound advice, woboyle, since it would appear the thread owner is someone well familiar with the technical side of hardware and operating systems given his stated goal to develop an RS-232 interface. I have had good success with Gentoo in these situations.
Nanouk