[icruise]

I've got a Windows subnotebook that is a number of years old. It originally came with Windows ME, which was the spawn of the devil (there was about a 50/50 chance of the machine freezing up when I tried to put it into suspend mode, for example). I upgraded to Windows XP when the manufacturer offered an upgrade, and while that solved much of the stability problem, with only 128MB of RAM, the computer ran pretty slowly. If you just stuck to using one program at a time, it was semi-bearable (and by this time, I wasn't using it for much serious work). But over the subsequent months and years it's deteriorated so that it's a great deal slower and it can take 15 minutes or more to wake up from suspend mode. It might be a hardware problem, in which case it's best to just scrap the thing, but I wanted to try putting Linux just to see how it would run. But here is where things get complicated.

The machine has no internal optical drive. It uses a PC-card CD-ROM that cannot be used for booting, and can't even be used in DOS without a special driver which I have lost. It can boot from a USB floppy, though. I have successfully removed the hard disk from the laptop and can connect it to my Windows desktop in a firewire case. I tried copying the Ubuntu install disk directly to the hard drive, but that didn't work. And I tried installing Ubuntu onto the drive in the firewire case using my desktop, but that didn't work either (I didn't really understand the error message). Is there any way to get Ubuntu or any other similar Linux distro on my laptop in this situation? I either need something that uses boot floppies or something that can be installed using a firewire drive. Any hints? I've considered using a 2.5" to IDE adapter to install the drive directly in my desktop, but that's a little more work that I'm willing to do right now. I don't need a dual-boot scenario. I've already deleted Windows and I don't mind only having Linux on the machine.

[black bear theory]

i had a similar situation where i couldn't boot an old comp from the cd-rom drive. i never figured a way around it.

maybe you can boot off of a USB flash drive (damn small linux)? and then install whichever distro you want over the 'net. if you're comfortable with it, you could try gentoo or vidalinux (both allow compiling the system from source) which would allow you to pare down your system for better performance.

[leehotti]

I had an old sony like this... I could run linux on it by googling for viao websites about people wanting to run linux, then booting into dos and doing some wacky crazy script stuff that I have no idea how to do. Best bet would be getting hte Linux on 1 CD to boot. It's possible. You'd just have to find the drivers for the CD ROM.

[baw]

Is there an ethernet port? I've installed linux in the past over FTP. Slow (depending on your pipe to the internet) but it worked. Been a few years though.

[icruise]

Originally Posted by baw

Is there an ethernet port?

Unfortunately no. After reformatting the hard disk, I tried again to get Ubuntu to install onto the firewire drive, and it actually worked this time. And I was able to get it to boot (sort of) after putting the drive back in my laptop (I had to change some of the bootloader config settings). But once it got past booting, the screen became all garbled and I wasn't able to see anything or even tell if it had successfully booted or not, so I gave up. I'm trying to reinstall XP on it now. Maybe a fresh install will help. Even reinstalling Windows on these older machines is a big pain. It really makes me appreciate how easy we have it on the Mac (or for newer Windows computers, for that matter).

[Corpse of Chewbacca]

this is an interesting issue. no ethernet? no cd? usb floppy? i have done ftp installs of Fedora but that required a floppy drive. perhaps if you download the ISOs of Fedora (or whatever linux flavor u want) onto the HD and use a floppy boot disk for your linux flavor and tell it to do a local install, with the path set to the ISO location. you should prolly do this on a seperate partition, as well.