Linux.....or smaller

hi..me again.....

i recently obtained a nice freebie, a 500mhz p3 computer, 10 gig drive and 128 or ram...they were going to trash it, and about 50 others..shame i couldnt store the others in my locker...there was already some oak, 3 moniters, and a tower pc in there ;-)

anyways, the system i liberated was small, very small, some kinda compaq busness model, and in it being small contained no optical drive, only a floppy drive...

i was wondering if there was any good os out there that could fit on several floppy discs, not just linux either.......in the meantime, ill check for some old cd drives...


thanks

Ryan

 

Microsoft Windows 3.11 WFWG fits on 8 floppies.
Microsoft Windows 95 fits on around 20 floppies.

I can send you the files, if you know how to uncompress the .IMZ disk image files ;-).

 

tempting, but growing up in a amiga/windows enviroment i would like to try something different...still i might take you up on that....

 

not floppy size but could probably be adapted to is http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/.
Probably the smallest available with a GUI.
for more which will fit on floppys see here http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Floppy/

 

some linux distro fit on one single Floppy. GUI included. But it doesn't have alot of depth, as you would imagine. i say find a cheap CDrom drive, to exploit your system as you could and should.

 

I've got a sealed copy of OS2 laying around somewhere... circa 1994-1997... i'm pretty sure that's on a stack of floppies. Your other option, if you want to use windows, is to send a norton ghost image over a network connection. Only problem will be the drivers... If you want OS2, let me know, I think its a liscense for a 4 cpu server...

 

Check if the BIOS supports booting from USB devices such as USB CDs or HDDs.

 

I'd say that you probably want to do a network install of Linux.

 

just find out if your system allows boting from usb devices, if not just open up the system and hang a loose cd-rom drive from the slave cable and install windows from it, i'd go for windows 2K myself or a good linux distro.

 

One alternative may be to get some dist that have the installation program on floppy and then download the hole dist. I think i made something like that before with slackware...but it took a while...;-)
But at that time, i think i did build the hole dist from just a realy minimal slackware installation (that basicly only had the kernel, the possability to connect to internet and the some basic *nix commands)

 

hm.. I think I've read that there is some version of QNX (http://www.qnx.com/) that fits on floppy disk.. but I'm not 100% sure

 

i was wondering, i dont have a thumb drive, but could i use my mp3 player for it instead......i checked the system today, it all looked good in there...needed to ste...errr liberated some old ram though, i looked at the cpu, a 500mhz p3, which sits flat on the motherboard......seems like something is missing from it, i cant really explain it without a pic....i plugged the system up, without a moniter (hard to find one at lunch time) and it turned on, hdd works...and i didnt get any beeps so i think its running good....no os though for sure, as hdd goes silent after spinning up........im gonna see if i can get a cd drive off my comp teacher tommorow, if not, ill try one of the above mentioned os.......

 

You want to hope its not the heatsink/fan. If it is then it aint going to run for that long...

 

i had it on for about 2 minutes..,...from my experience, they usually go after about a minute or 2....its hard to tell whats missing, the case design is soo fu*&^^*& to begin with, the whole unit is maybe 10,11" maybe 2" thick.....top slides off, and all you see is the psu, then where the hdd is, you flip that.(its on a rack thingy) and that flips over with the disk drive, and or optical drive if you have one installed, and underneath all that shite is the cpu.....i remember there was a comp around with a black heat sink exhaust, i cant remember which style comp i seen it one....

http://www.1coolpc.com/install/ripped.jpg

it looks just like that...where the foily thingy is on the case, mine is missing....as for heat sinks, i think thats all thats too it, not enough room for anything else

 

From the picture, you're saying it's using a slot style processor? Usually those just have an 80 mm case fan blowing air accross them. Unfortunately that isn't enough to keep them cool. This is where most people get the idea that E-Machines are unreliable as they used to use that exact processor in their early pc's and didn't have a sufficent cooling system. I would recomend putting an 80 mm fan in and calling it even. Yeah, you'll have heat issues but to be honest, i have the same processor (500mhz p3, slotted) and it ran with a dead cooling fan for years. As always, your results may vary. Do not try this at home.

 

first i need to hook it up to a moniter, see what the bios is saying and whats happening..that will be tommorow hopefully(thursday) thing is, if parts are dead, im screwed for awhile, the room full of parts met its maker today..they were taken to the dump...sigh...if only i had more lockers....anyways heres hoping to the best


edit* and the pic i linked to, refers to that silvery thingy, the processor was not a slot type, it looked like that but laid flat against the motherboard, unless there was a daughterboard it slotted into that i missed

 

oooh OS/2, t3h retr0! It was actually quite a good OS, shame it received little love.

 

It's probably a socket 370 then. There's probably some crappy small heatsink and fan on top of the CPU - probably something like this - or there may even just be a very big heatsink on it and some passive cooling.

You can probably upgrade it to 1GHz if it's one of them, though it'll cost a bit. Half a gig of RAM still costs about €100 new, but if you find another 128MB Windows 2000 should run fine on it.

If you don't have some CD drive you can put in it temporarily, i'd recommend just putting the hard disk in another PC and copying whatever OS CD-ROM straight onto the hard disk - you can do that with Windows anyway.

 

Actually windows 2000 works fine on 128mb. and with a processor like that its not likely to be that essential to have 256. In fact, I've installed XP on 64mb, that was fun!

 

I'm personally very, very fond of BeOS. Supposedly 'dead' for many years now, it has a dedicated fanbase that keeps hacking away to keep it surprisingly up-to-date. DVD drive/burner support, the lastest graphic cards, Mozilla - it really won't die. Yellowtab's Zeta is a really high-quality commercial re-imagining of the OS, but should you be looking for something more along the lines of free, you could try the BeOS 5 Personal Edition or BeOS Max v3.1. Also, keep an eye on the development of Haiku, a total rebuilding of BeOS for modern use.

You will, however, need a CD-ROM drive and some access to a CD burner to install any of these.