Re: Minimal system installation
On 28/12/2004 05:08 Greg 'groggy' Lehey said the following: On Monday, 27 December 2004 at 13:21:51 -0600, Dan Thomas wrote: A friend gave me a laptop with a Pentium 100 and 24 megs of ram. It only has a floppy drive. What version of FreeBSD do you recommend and would you send me the link to download it. It's possible to run FreeBSD on a machine like that (in fact, I intend to start doing so on a very similar machine today), but only as a diskless workstation. FreeBSD needs a disk *somewhere*. If this is all you have, you can't run FreeBSD on it. but you should be able to run PicoBSD on it. ;) -- Regards, /\_/\ All dogs go to heaven. [EMAIL PROTECTED](0 0)http://www.alphaque.com/ +==oOO--(_)--OOo==+ | for a in past present future; do| | for b in clients employers associates relatives neighbours pets; do | | echo The opinions here in no way reflect the opinions of my $a $b. | | done; done | +=+ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Minimal system installation
On Dec 28, Dinesh Nair launched this into the bitstream: On 28/12/2004 05:08 Greg 'groggy' Lehey said the following: On Monday, 27 December 2004 at 13:21:51 -0600, Dan Thomas wrote: A friend gave me a laptop with a Pentium 100 and 24 megs of ram. It only has a floppy drive. What version of FreeBSD do you recommend and would you send me the link to download it. It's possible to run FreeBSD on a machine like that (in fact, I intend to start doing so on a very similar machine today), but only as a diskless workstation. FreeBSD needs a disk *somewhere*. If this is all you have, you can't run FreeBSD on it. but you should be able to run PicoBSD on it. ;) How about this one...a laptop with the CD inoperable and the floppy missing. The PCMCIA controller may/may_not be fried because no known PCMCIA network card will work, but owing to the vagaries of Win98 who knows for sure. All we know presently is that the serial port works. Disk is OK and it has 40MB of memory. Add to that the fact that for ridiculously sentimental reasons I am reluctant to part with the darn thing, so as a last ditch effort I'd sure like to put *some* BSD on it. The question ishow? ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Minimal system installation
Dinesh Nair wrote: On 28/12/2004 05:08 Greg 'groggy' Lehey said the following: On Monday, 27 December 2004 at 13:21:51 -0600, Dan Thomas wrote: A friend gave me a laptop with a Pentium 100 and 24 megs of ram. It only has a floppy drive. What version of FreeBSD do you recommend and would you send me the link to download it. It's possible to run FreeBSD on a machine like that (in fact, I intend to start doing so on a very similar machine today), but only as a diskless workstation. FreeBSD needs a disk *somewhere*. If this is all you have, you can't run FreeBSD on it. but you should be able to run PicoBSD on it. ;) I said it before and I'll say it again, FreeBSD 4.x run's fine on systems of this calibre. I have a p100 laptop with 40MB of ram running 4-STABLE and it makes a fine console only workstation. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Minimal system installation
Your just not going to be able to do this one as it is, you need to boot into FreeBSD in order to write a FreeBSD boot selector or boot loader on the hard disk. Borrow another laptop and temporairly move the hard drive from the first laptop to the second, then load FreeBSD onto it and move the disk back. Have you tried looking for a floppy for this laptop on Ebay? In theory if you had a copy of Norton Ghost you could ghost an image of the laptop hard disk running FreeBSD (obviously you would need another identical working laptop) then on your laptop you could dialup with a modem and download a packet driver and try running it under win98 DOS using a 3com 3c89 pcmcia card (which is one of the few pcmcia cards that will run a packet driver without card services) then running the ghost client, than pulling the image over the network. Incidentally you probably can't get the pcmcia slot to work because with a laptop that old, it's a 16 bit pcmcia card slot, and all the pcmcia cards sold today are 32 bit cardbus ones. That 3c589 3com pcmcia card is your friend. It's not in production anymore but there's tons on Ebay. Ted -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Colin J. Raven Sent: Monday, December 27, 2004 2:17 PM To: Dinesh Nair Cc: Greg 'groggy' Lehey; Dan Thomas; freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Minimal system installation On Dec 28, Dinesh Nair launched this into the bitstream: On 28/12/2004 05:08 Greg 'groggy' Lehey said the following: On Monday, 27 December 2004 at 13:21:51 -0600, Dan Thomas wrote: A friend gave me a laptop with a Pentium 100 and 24 megs of ram. It only has a floppy drive. What version of FreeBSD do you recommend and would you send me the link to download it. It's possible to run FreeBSD on a machine like that (in fact, I intend to start doing so on a very similar machine today), but only as a diskless workstation. FreeBSD needs a disk *somewhere*. If this is all you have, you can't run FreeBSD on it. but you should be able to run PicoBSD on it. ;) How about this one...a laptop with the CD inoperable and the floppy missing. The PCMCIA controller may/may_not be fried because no known PCMCIA network card will work, but owing to the vagaries of Win98 who knows for sure. All we know presently is that the serial port works. Disk is OK and it has 40MB of memory. Add to that the fact that for ridiculously sentimental reasons I am reluctant to part with the darn thing, so as a last ditch effort I'd sure like to put *some* BSD on it. The question ishow? ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Minimal system installation
On Dec 28, Ted Mittelstaedt launched this into the bitstream: Your just not going to be able to do this one as it is, you need to boot into FreeBSD in order to write a FreeBSD boot selector or boot loader on the hard disk. Borrow another laptop and temporairly move the hard drive from the first laptop to the second, then load FreeBSD onto it and move the disk back. Have you tried looking for a floppy for this laptop on Ebay? In theory if you had a copy of Norton Ghost you could ghost an image of the laptop hard disk running FreeBSD (obviously you would need another identical working laptop) then on your laptop you could dialup with a modem and download a packet driver and try running it under win98 DOS using a 3com 3c89 pcmcia card (which is one of the few pcmcia cards that will run a packet driver without card services) then running the ghost client, than pulling the image over the network. Incidentally you probably can't get the pcmcia slot to work because with a laptop that old, it's a 16 bit pcmcia card slot, and all the pcmcia cards sold today are 32 bit cardbus ones. That 3c589 3com pcmcia card is your friend. It's not in production anymore but there's tons on Ebay. Ted How about this one...a laptop with the CD inoperable and the floppy missing. The PCMCIA controller may/may_not be fried because no known PCMCIA network card will work, but owing to the vagaries of Win98 who knows for sure. All we know presently is that the serial port works. Disk is OK and it has 40MB of memory. Add to that the fact that for ridiculously sentimental reasons I am reluctant to part with the darn thing, so as a last ditch effort I'd sure like to put *some* BSD on it. The question ishow? Ted, Thanks for an enormously helpful response, greatly appreciated. I think I'll leave the laptop on it's shelf for another few weeks/months and go hunt up a 3C589 PCMCIA card, then try yanking the H/D and proceeding as you outlined above. Somewhat tangentially I have a suspicion that the PCMCIA controller may well be cooked because if memory serves, I had one of those cards back when which worked and then abruptly failed. Wondering if the card itself had fried I popped it into a recent laptop and it immediately passed packets...at least that's my recollection. Nonetheless despite that gloomy outlook I'll still give this a shot with another card of the heritage you described. Thanks for taking the time to explain the why's/how's on this, I have a clearer view of the upcoming task now. Warm Regards Thanks, -Colin ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Minimal system installation
Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: Your just not going to be able to do this one as it is, you need to boot into FreeBSD in order to write a FreeBSD boot selector or boot loader on the hard disk. Borrow another laptop and temporairly move the hard drive from the first laptop to the second, then load FreeBSD onto it and move the disk back. Have you tried looking for a floppy for this laptop on Ebay? In theory if you had a copy of Norton Ghost you could ghost an image of the laptop hard disk running FreeBSD (obviously you would need another identical working laptop) then on your laptop you could dialup with a modem and download a packet driver and try running it under win98 DOS using a 3com 3c89 pcmcia card (which is one of the few pcmcia cards that will run a packet driver without card services) then running the ghost client, than pulling the image over the network. Incidentally you probably can't get the pcmcia slot to work because with a laptop that old, it's a 16 bit pcmcia card slot, and all the pcmcia cards sold today are 32 bit cardbus ones. That 3c589 3com pcmcia card is your friend. It's not in production anymore but there's tons on Ebay. Ted How about this one...a laptop with the CD inoperable and the floppy missing. The PCMCIA controller may/may_not be fried because no known PCMCIA network card will work, but owing to the vagaries of Win98 who knows for sure. All we know presently is that the serial port works. Disk is OK and it has 40MB of memory. Add to that the fact that for ridiculously sentimental reasons I am reluctant to part with the darn thing, so as a last ditch effort I'd sure like to put *some* BSD on it. The question ishow? You have ONE option (with many adaptations): In all cases you are going to have to remove the hard drive from the laptop and do the install from another system with working floppy and cd-rom drives: You can do it from another laptop. You can do it from a desktop if you have a 2.5 to 3.5 IDE converter cable. You can do it from VMware* (and maybe bochs) if you have a 2.5 USB/Firewire/whatever external drive. *If you do it from VMware remember to change fstab as VMware emulates IDE as SCSI so your mount points will be pointing to the wrong type of disk. After you do this invest in a 16-bit PCMCIA NIC card (3com 589x, linksys PCMPC100). ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Minimal system installation
Colin J. Raven wrote: How about this one...a laptop with the CD inoperable and the floppy missing. The PCMCIA controller may/may_not be fried... I'm assuming built-in networking is asking too much of this poor old machine? :c( ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Minimal system installation
On Dec 28, Tom Vilot launched this into the bitstream: Colin J. Raven wrote: How about this one...a laptop with the CD inoperable and the floppy missing. The PCMCIA controller may/may_not be fried... I'm assuming built-in networking is asking too much of this poor old machine? Sadly yes. It's either a Pentium 60 or Pentium 90. I'm ashamed to say it, but I don't remember. What I remember is this thing cost a damn fortune when it first came out (don't they all) and I ran a complete company off this 'lil guy. I remember also that it went all over the world with me. Ridiculous to say perhaps, but I almost can't bear to throw it away if it has even the *slightest* final use before it bites the dust. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Minimal system installation (was: What version)
On Monday, 27 December 2004 at 13:21:51 -0600, Dan Thomas wrote: A friend gave me a laptop with a Pentium 100 and 24 megs of ram. It only has a floppy drive. What version of FreeBSD do you recommend and would you send me the link to download it. It's possible to run FreeBSD on a machine like that (in fact, I intend to start doing so on a very similar machine today), but only as a diskless workstation. FreeBSD needs a disk *somewhere*. If this is all you have, you can't run FreeBSD on it. Greg -- When replying to this message, please copy the original recipients. If you don't, I may ignore the reply or reply to the original recipients. For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/questions.html See complete headers for address and phone numbers. pgpCYPfwHi3HD.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Minimal system installation (was: What version)
On Monday, 27 December 2004 at 16:01:57 -0600, Dan Thomas wrote: On Monday, December 27, 2004 3:08 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: On Monday, 27 December 2004 at 13:21:51 -0600, Dan Thomas wrote: A friend gave me a laptop with a Pentium 100 and 24 megs of ram. It only has a floppy drive. What version of FreeBSD do you recommend and would you send me the link to download it. It's possible to run FreeBSD on a machine like that (in fact, I intend to start doing so on a very similar machine today), but only as a diskless workstation. FreeBSD needs a disk *somewhere*. If this is all you have, you can't run FreeBSD on it. I have a 750 mb hardrive on it. Ah. You said you only had a floppy. Is this big enough? Yes, you can do something useful with that. I can put another drive if necessary. I think I have a 4 gb on the shelf. You can certainly fill that too :-) So your question is how to install the software? Your best bet would be to put the disk in a machine with a CD-ROM and install it there. You can then move the disk back to the target machine. Make sure that the disk is connected the same way in both machines (preferably primary master). If you can't do that, and you can't install a CD-ROM drive temporarily, you'll have to follow the instructions in the handbook for floppy installations. It's certainly faster to move disks or CD-ROM drives. Greg -- Finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. pgpv6UuCMWf25.pgp Description: PGP signature
