Linux for PC without HDD

[Dr-NO]

So i am a total noob with linux and pretty much everything else (English included)

I have this configuration:
384 MB RAM
64 MB GeForce2 Video Card
AMD Athlon 1700+ 1.4GHz
two CD-ROMs
Creative ct4810 sound card
Jetway V266B Motherboard (integrated sound card is turned of from BIOS)
A LAN card (i don't remember what)
I also have a FDD but the cable from the power supply cant reach it so it's not in use.

I only miss a HDD.
All I want from this PC is to use it to listen to music, watch movies and maybe browse the internet.

So far I've tried Damn Small Linux Live CD. It recognized the sound card and I was able to play mp3s from a flash drive, but no movies (.avi format)
For some reason the PC now hangs when I try to boot the Live CD (usually there is a penguin picture and some colored text under, not it just shows me the penguin) But I don't think I need the DSL anymore, since it doesn't play .avi files.

Recommend me an easy to use OS which can do the things mentioned above and boot from CD.

Thanks

[nujinini]

If you want to give it another shot, I think you can install vlc player in dsl. I find it to be a great player.

# yum install vlc

Otherwise, you can try Mint, AntiX and Puppy Linux, among the many flavors of linux out there.

Good luck!

[rokytnji]

Recommend me an easy to use OS which can do the things mentioned above and boot from CD

Puppy Linux Discussion Forum :: View topic - Classic Pup 2.14X -- Updated 2 series

yum install vlc

Won't work because DSL uses apt. Plus DSL live is read only on CD. Puppy However is king of
frugal,booting and running in ram (384 MB RAM) is cutting it close though without some swap. You can save changes in Puppy to CD also (not a lot of room though on CD)

Edit: Just thought of something. Since you have 2 CD drives. One Cd drive can be used to save changes. Other to load Puppy 2.14. Once Puppy loads. You can eject the Puppy 2.14 (it will be loaded in ram to run) and you can use that CD drive for other things.

[sgosnell]

If you have USB ports, get a flash drive and use that as the HDD (or SSD). You can get them cheap, and while not as fast as an internal HDD because of the USB bottleneck, they work fairly well as a boot drive. I have a netbook with WinXP on the SSD, and mostly run Linux from an SD card in the slot, which runs as fast as WinXP on the SSD, boots faster too. Your main problem will be the small amount of RAM, but DSL might run acceptably, especially for simple things like playing audio files.

[rokytnji]

And to add what I suggested above. Pretty Basic Puppy with most modern apps. 90MB Iso. (Means it will only load up and use 90MB of ram)

BrowserLinux

Plus pick and choose your self from

ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/

[Dr-NO]

In the first post I mentioned the flash drive.
It's Kingston Data traveler 4GB. I am not sure if the motherboard accepts booting from a flash drive (In the BIOS options there are USB ZIP, USB FDD and USB HDD but I'm pretty sure the flash drive is not any of these.

I will try the Puppy tomorrow. Now I am trying Ubuntu 10.10
It works very slow on the PC but I find it nicer than DSL
but it doesn't have any codecs. :/

[rokytnji]

In the first post I mentioned the flash drive.
It's Kingston Data traveler 4GB. I am not sure if the motherboard accepts booting from a flash drive (In the BIOS options there are USB ZIP, USB FDD and USB HDD but I'm pretty sure the flash drive is not any of these.

I will try the Puppy tomorrow. Now I am trying Ubuntu 10.10
It works very slow on the PC but I find it nicer than DSL
but it doesn't have any codecs. :/

The Browser Linux Link I gave won't play movies (I think) just music. You could install Puppy to USB as a frugal install (but you don't have your floppy connected to make a wakepup floppy which will find your USB and boot it bypassing bios).

hard-Puppy

Puppy has something special, called WakePup, developed by Puppy enthusiast pakt (forum name) -- look in the "Setup" menu and you will see an entry "WakePup create boot floppy". This will create a floppy disk that your PC can boot from. The WakePup floppy disk scans the PC and finds Puppy on a USB drive, hard drive, or CD/DVD drive.

By the way. Forgot to mention. I am posting from Puppy Dingo 4 on a IBM A22m 1000hz, 256MB Ram, DVDROM which plays movies via VLC pet package installed seperately after install.

[IMG=http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/9851/biker.th.png][/IMG]

[Dr-NO]

You were right.
I tried Puppy 2.16.1
And amazing! It plays mp3s and movies. I managed to watch a "How I met your mother" episode

I haven't tried the Internet but It should work (If there is an option to change the LAN card's MAC address because my Internet Provider has a MAC address restriction.

There are also some problems.
The firs one is that I am used to double clicking and I always start things twice
Also sometimes, after some minutes of normal working, when I try to open the Device Manager it freezes and I have to restart so I keep the manager always opened.
Also i click on an mp3 file and gxine starts to play it, but there isn't any window so I have to kill the process to stop it.
Another problem is the FullScreen mode on gxine. It goes blinks black every 2 or 3 seconds. It works fine when it's not in full screen.

Also I tried to install it to my flash drive, It was mounted, it formated it and made the partitions needed but didn't start installing. I haven't tried it again.

Also I found myself an Old Samsung HDD 7.7GB but it has some problems and I couldn't install any OS on it. I managed to install DOS 7.1 but it couldn't boot.
I will try to install Puppy to it but I don't think it will work.

[rokytnji]

The firs one is that I am used to double clicking and I always start things twice

Normal behaivor for a noob in Jims Window Manager (JWM) in Puppy. You're not the first to experiemce this.

Also sometimes, after some minutes of normal working, when I try to open the Device Manager it freezes and I have to restart so I keep the manager always opened.
Also i click on an mp3 file and gxine starts to play it, but there isn't any window so I have to kill the process to stop it.
Another problem is the FullScreen mode on gxine. It goes blinks black every 2 or 3 seconds. It works fine when it's not in full screen.

All I can think is that since the operating system is loaded into ram. And Gxine,Device Manager, Browser can be heavy pulling in more ram. That you need to only open one app at a time and close it while running live CD. If opening Device Manager. Don't have Gxine or Browser open. Same same with browser or Gxine. You have no swap partition, or a hard install, so with the limited ram you have, some concessions must be made. Nature of the beast so to speak. So one app opened at a time then close it.

Hope you get my meaning.

[Dr-NO]

I managed to install the OS to the Hard Disk.
It was not booting normally from it, as I was expecting. It was not booting at. But also no error messages were shown. So I tried the Hiren's Boot CD because there is an option to boot from the HDD and the last time my HDD was behaving that way I was able to get at least an error message to know what's wrong. So I tried it and it worked. Now I have to use this CD to boot every time but at least ti's working.

About the problems:
The first one (my double klicking) is gradually healing
The monitor keeps blinking black (I'm not sure if I am using the right expression) in Full Screen while watching a movie. I will install VLC player later when I get time to set up the Internet connection and I hope that this is a player's problem.
The other problem where the music starts but the player window is not showing still remains. So I use open from the player menu.
The problem with the device manager is the same when booting from the HDD.
even when it's the only program loaded. :/

PS: I am now using mount and umount and don't need to open the device manager

Also: How do I change the MAC address of the LAN card. I managed to do it in Ubuntu 10.10 but this is different.
I googled and found # ipconfig eth0 hw ether 00:00:00:00:00:00 (of course not with zeros) to write in the console but it's not working.