THE Problem

[Khayman]

Soo i got this oooold laptop.. toshiba sattellite 200cdt.
It is a intel pentium 100 with 40mb memory and a new 30gig harddrive.
so i tried to find the lightest linux.. and i think i found a winner... Xubuntu?
Thats question nr 1. is it the best for my poor computer?
Right now i have one partition on 40gig with only windows 98 working on it.
I lost the diskdrive so there is only a cddriver to use... BUT the bios is so old (and can not be upgraded) so you cant boot from a cd!
Yes now you see my problem
so what i did to install windows98 is.. i took the drive from the laptop and put it in my friends desktop computer and installed windows.
after that i put the drive back in to the laptop and booted and installed all drivers from the win98 cd (yes it works when you are in windows).
So now it works.
But i want dual boot with win98 and xubuntu...
I tried to install xubuntu on the rest of the harddrive by doing two more partitions on the harddrive from the desktopcomputer and it works like a charm until i move the drive back to the laptop...
When i start the laptop i got an "Error 18".
I did look up error 18 and this is what i found "error 18 happens when BIOS can't boot to a cylinder too far into the disk. Old BIOS's couldn't handle disks that were too big (too big could be greater than 512 MB, or 1 GB, or others depending on the BIOS). Thus, on old computers, if the partition containing /boot is not the first partition on the drive, you often get an error 18".
Soo now i cant start ether windows or xubuntu until i move the harddrive back to the desktopcomputer again.
So i installed win98 from scratch and now it works again... but no linux
Is there anything i can do to install linux on my old machine without booting from cd or disk?
Can i boot linux from win98? can i install linux from win98?
Is there anyway i can get through this problem.. i also heard that if you installed linux on a drive and move it to another computer it mostly doesent run...
help...

[DThor]

Personally, I'd say it's not worth the effort. You can only install an OS on a computer either from CD/DVD drive or over the network, which I'm quite certain your bios wouldn't support being that old.

However, on the other system, you can set up the boot partition(/boot) to be in the first part of the disk, that's the part that those older BIOS's cared about - and then the main /usr higher up. In theory that works. Frankly, though, I'm not sure I'd go through all those headaches with such an old machine when you can get far better machines for next to nothing nowadays. I understand not having spare cash to drop on a lower end brand new system, but hopefully if you're in an urban area there'll be someone advertising an old computer for sale.

Btw, it's helpful to make subjects that are meaningful, instead of generic ones like "THE Problem". Something like "Install Linux on old laptop?" would attract the right sort of people that would answer. They might have more answers than me.

DT

[Khayman]

Personally, I'd say it's not worth the effort. You can only install an OS on a computer either from CD/DVD drive or over the network, which I'm quite certain your bios wouldn't support being that old.

However, on the other system, you can set up the boot partition(/boot) to be in the first part of the disk, that's the part that those older BIOS's cared about - and then the main /usr higher up. In theory that works. Frankly, though, I'm not sure I'd go through all those headaches with such an old machine when you can get far better machines for next to nothing nowadays. I understand not having spare cash to drop on a lower end brand new system, but hopefully if you're in an urban area there'll be someone advertising an old computer for sale.

Btw, it's helpful to make subjects that are meaningful, instead of generic ones like "THE Problem". Something like "Install Linux on old laptop?" would attract the right sort of people that would answer. They might have more answers than me.

DT

Aha.. yea maybe your right i should invest in a better machine.. this i got from a friend and i just wanted to learn about linux on it... thanks for the tips anyway

[truoc444]

i have a pentium 150 with 64 MB Ram that at the time i didn't have any cd drive only a floppy. i found some debian boot floppies that started the net install. (i also had an old school xircom network card) booted from the floppies it found the network card and away it went. by default it loaded gnome which was way slow, but i removed that and installed xfce and it moves pretty good now. what can i say i love my old toughbook and didn't want to end it's life quite yet.

[Khayman]

i have a pentium 150 with 64 MB Ram that at the time i didn't have any cd drive only a floppy. i found some debian boot floppies that started the net install. (i also had an old school xircom network card) booted from the floppies it found the network card and away it went. by default it loaded gnome which was way slow, but i removed that and installed xfce and it moves pretty good now. what can i say i love my old toughbook and didn't want to end it's life quite yet.

Hmmm.. yea it´s something about those old machines... cant explain it really...
They are so slow that you know it´s no ideé to install a lot of things to slow it down more, and thats why i like it... they are always clean
Thank you! now i gog the spirit back! i have to get linux up and running on it.
By the way.. what is xfce?
Ps: cant find any 16bits networkcards for my laptop... do you know were to order one?

[Khayman]

... installed xfce and it moves pretty good now.

Are Xfce lighter then Xubuntu?

[aysiu]

Xubuntu is Ubuntu with XFCE.

[Khayman]

Xubuntu is Ubuntu with XFCE.

Hehe okej thanks

[Khayman]

Can i put the files from a live cd or install cd on a partition of the harddrive and boot it through windows dos?

[aysiu]

Can i put the files from a live cd or install cd on a partition of the harddrive and boot it through windows dos?

No. But the live CD doesn't affect your hard drive, so you can just boot it, and it'll run off the CD itself and your computer's RAM.