I have this "old" laptop I purchased from e-bay a while back for travel work and such. A Mitsubishi Amity CN2. I love this thing. It's only about 2.6 times bigger than my Palm about as heavy, but it was made in 1997-98, has an USB port(which was the poo in the day), a whopping 2.0GB drive, P166MMX, with 64MB EDO RAM, IR port, serial, parallel, PCMCIA, no internal CDROM or floppy, and weighed about 2.6 lbs. I slap the ubiquitous Linksys EC2T for the NIC. The tip pointer is busted, but other than that, everything is fanriffic.
It originally came with 95, which sucked juice like no one's business. 98SE was probably the best windows for it, or windows 2K if you didn't mind waiting a bit during startup. After a while, though, work was providing me with laptops or pfft I stopped doing work while on vacation, and the laptop sat in its case.
A couple of years ago, I did an ftp install of RH8, just to see how that install worked, how linux ran on laptops, and to use it as a terminal for my other RH desktop. I had to do a FTP install because the laptop will not boot off of a CDROM, so most live CD's and bootable CD's aren't feasible unless I use a boot manager that will detect and use the Backpack I have for it. After this ordeal, I might look further into this.
I kept it to a minimal installation. No gui, developer packages, SSH, and postgres, and it was good. I grew tired of lugging cable with it whereever I went and it being such an old laptop, I didn't want to shell out the buckage for a wireless NIC and transmitter just so I can SSH into my p200. So I downloaded a crapload of books from Project Gutenberg and it became my e-book for toting to coffeehouses and such. Just ran vi on the the files and *boom* instant Island of Dr. Moreau. I was suprised how easy to read and use vi was for just reading text for extended periods of time.
And it's been a happy little bugger for that until I started working on compiling more machine-specific kernels for my linux box at work and at home. I picked it up one day and thought, "Hm... I bet this would be fun to compile for." Plus I wanted an excuse to just blow away RH8 and put a new distro on there that I hadn't tried before.
So I started looking around. Most of the bigger distributions these days still support ftp install, but I was disappointed to see RH's Fedora doesn't officially offers this. I'm sure I could monkey another installer to use Fedora's packages and an updated kernel, but at that point, I'm afraid I would be missing out on the ease of use fedora has over the other distros.
So I moved on to Slackware, a very stable and robust distribution that I've been happy with on most of the machines I've put it on, with the exception of the laptop. For some reason, the kernel that slackware boots off of(bare.i, bareacpi.i, ppide.i, whatever) panicks and quits before I can even get to a command prompt. I might try a slightly older kernel, but I want to try other distros before I head down that road.
SUSE Linux is one of the more popular commercialized distros out there that isn't Red Hat. They also were big supporters of the FTP install compared to others. Even their floppy boot image had a nice GUI splash screen and UI to it. However, and theirs is the most frutstrating, the loader locks up during the swap initialization. I've repartitioned the drive, upped the swap space to 512MB and even put Pikachu on it for good luck. But each time, it'd lockup right at the same place. Here again, if I can find a Linux Boot that will give me access to my backpack on either parallel, USB or the PCMCIA connector, I'll probably go that route.
But where's the challenge in that?
On to Debian, another popular distro that's more in the public sector like Slackware. It decides to crap out during the HW detection and say it can't find the HD(although Pocket Linux and ever other one didn't have a problem with it). Peh.
So for those of you scoring at home:
| Distro. | Outcome | reason |
|---|---|---|
| Fedora Core 2 | UNSUPPORTED! | No FTP support |
| Slackware | FAILED! | Kernel Panic! |
| SUSE | FAILED! | Install Crash |
| Debian | FAILED! | HD no detecto |
| Pocket Linux | Success! | But no internal floppy |
Some people may hawk for Gentoo, but they also do not have an official FTP install method. However, if I can find a boot manager that will let me run off of their live CD, I may give them a go. At this point, however, I'm going to focus my efforts on a boot disk that will give me CD-ROM access.
The fun continues!
Posted by Jeffrey at November 14, 2004 10:55 PM