Install Debian on Portege 7140

[pera451]

I have received a Toshiba Portege 7140 (Pentium III, 64 MB RAM) as a present. It has a floppy drive and no CD-ROM. I do have an external USB CD-ROM, but BIOS does not allow booting from it. Windows 98 SE is installed on the laptop.

What is the simplest way of installing Debian on this machine? Is there a way to copy disk images to the hard drive (to a FAT32 partition, for example, from Windows) and simply boot from there.

I have tried (almost) everything. Smart Boot Manager won't work, instlux does not work with Debian, etc. Am I overlooking something?

Thanks in advance!

[Daan]

READ THE MANUAL!

Debian GNU/Linux Installation Guide
4.3. Creating Floppies from Disk Images

[pera451]

I did that too...

With Etch, I came halfway... It started complaining about low memory, and that was it...

With Sarge, i managed to install some stuff from CD1, it boots correctly,
but only in the text mode... How can I proceed from that point?

Is there a way that I could transfer the whole DVD to the hard drive and
do the floppies thing, but without any use of the external CD?

Thanks!

[Daan]

With Sarge, i managed to install some stuff from CD1, it boots correctly,
but only in the text mode... How can I proceed from that point?

I think you still need to install the graphical stuff. Do

apt-get install xorg

as root. Will ask you for a CD I think. Then install a nice light weight window manager like Blackbox:

apt-get install blackbox

. Then, as normal user,

startx

Good luck.