Hi Mike,
a floppy only distro called MuLinux is available from
http://mulinux.nevalabs.org
It is one of the distros recommended in the "4 mb laptops" howto
that can boot up on an old Tosiba and can be used in ram or cloned
(ie written) onto a dos or ext2 partition.
With two 1730k floppies you get vi,lynx,mc,irc,mutt,fetchmail,fvwn95,
afterstep, dialup ppp (pap) and ethernet connection.
For samba,vnc,tetex,netscape 3 you have to addon another floppy for
each task but in total it will only take up about 20 meg on the hard
drive including 8 meg swap.
Based on Slackware 3.5 (glibc5) and very user friendly with setup
and help menus. The developer is an italian guy named Michele Andreoli
who goes thru the source code of the progs and edits out every line
of code he thinks can be removed or made smaller. Run's a mailing
list that is always humourous and welcome to newbies.
Once the eth0, modem and isp connection settings have been set up
they have to be saved as a "profile" to the first floppy to retain
settings permanent for the next boot up.
An amazing distro that can be up and running on a old 486 with 8 meg ram
in no time. Handy when travelling but with so many internet cafes around
every corner now it has perhaps lost it's usefullness for the backpacker.
Marcel Gagne wrote an article called "Getting Small with Linux Part 4"
which does a good job of explaining how to get it onto the 1730k floppy.
http://www2.linuxjournal.com/articles/sysadmin/030.html
The problem with mulinux, basic linux, monkey and most of the other
small distros is that their proggies are downloaded from their websites
only and are libc5 based so you can't always make use of the lastest/
greatest linux programmes.
Dragon (libc6) is a 150 meg download based on Slackware 7.1 so it is probably
easier to install Slackware 7.1's zipslack from a cd and build on that.
I recommend that you install the Slackware 7.1 a and n series (by floppy
or cdrom) if your machine has 16 meg ram and then add any x series apps
you want to run. Use minicom, pine and mc in console and windowmaker or
fvwm2 as a window manager.
I have a fvwm2 configuration script which has been set up to look and
feel like Kde 1.1. List members are welcome to contact me if they
would like a copy of this.
It is configured for fvwm2 2.4.7 which has been around a few years and
still in use on Slackware 8.1
Not updated yet for fvwm2 2.5.0 that came with Redhat 7.3.
cheers,
Keith.
On Tue, 23 Jul 2002, Tim Wright wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Jul 2002, Mike wrote:
>
> > The question: Could you point me to a LINUX which I can load from a
> > bootable floppy to the point where I can access my LAN - and through
> > that, the Internet? Or maybe I can put something onto my Windows 2000
> > machine that I can use to load Linux onto my new machine.
>
