Great moments in failed endeavors

November 17, 2005 10:32 AM

I recently acquired a vintage laptop with Windows 95 installed on it. I would like to install Linux on it.

I must preface this with a caveat: I am a Linux virgin. Saying that, Is there any feasible way to install Linux onto this laptop? The specs are 1 gig HD, 16 mb ram, between 133-200mhz processor. I only plan on using this laptop for word processing, and I want a more stable format than Windows 95. So the main questions:

Is there an appropriate version of Linux to install on the computer? Is it a difficult process? The laptop only has a floppy drive, will that be a hindrance to the installation process? Would an early version of Linux be user-friendly/decent at text editing? Am I wasting my time?

Thanks in advance.

posted by cloeburner to computers & internet (30 comments total)

really, it's best to have the worst first time possible. i say pop your linux cherry without seeking any advice, get pwn3d, be intalled into a botnet, and find your place in society as a member of a thriving community of zombie boxes.
posted by soma lkzx at 10:38 AM on November 17, 2005

Here are some potentially useful links for you:
Previous AskMe thread
Linux on Laptops
posted by exogenous at 10:42 AM on November 17, 2005

Blast, I tried searching for other ask.me questions but I did not see that one. Oh well, my situation is a bit different, and I found soma's advice to be particularly useful..
posted by cloeburner at 10:46 AM on November 17, 2005

Judging from the responses in that previous thread, the installation seems to be rather difficult [considering that I don't have a cd-rom drive]. Well there goes another pipe dream down the toilet.
posted by cloeburner at 10:48 AM on November 17, 2005

I tried to do something similar once. Most modern linux distributions are aimed at powerful, modern machines and require a lot of drinve space and/or memory. it was frustrating and I couldn't get it to work.

You may have luck with an old distribution and then try upgrading to a newer kernel, but that's a lot of work.

There are some "small linux" distros around. Maybe try Tiny Linux.
posted by GuyZero at 10:54 AM on November 17, 2005

The lack of a CDROM drive is problematic. Does it support booting from USB? Unlikely given it's age but you never know. There are versions of linux out there you can install on a USB stick and boot from.
posted by beowulf573 at 10:54 AM on November 17, 2005

Your easiest path to get a working Linux laptop with those constraints:

1) get a part-time job
2) save $400
3) get a cheap Dell Inspiron (watch for sales and rebates)
4) install Ubuntu

But, if you insist, here are pointers to Linux distros on floppy:

http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/Linux/Distributions/Tiny/Floppy_Sized/
http://users.sunet.com.au/~tsn/floppy_linux.html
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Floppy/

Note that their emphasis is on being bootable from floppy, not on installing. And they're usually focused on security or rescue, not on word processing. You'll probably end up with, at best, a lightweight text editor.

And here's a fun guide to the pleasures of installing the OS over the serial port.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 10:57 AM on November 17, 2005

Here's how to install my favorite distro, Fedora Core, from a floppy. It's gotten tricky since the linux kernel size surpassed floppy capacity, but it's certainly doable. I honestly wouldn't bother with any of that tinylinux crap. Find a way to bootstrap a regular distro.
posted by moift at 11:02 AM on November 17, 2005

Don't give up just because you don't have a CD drive. There are many ways to install Linux on your machine:

1) net install, if it has an ethernet card, and if the distro supports it.
2) get an external usb drive.
3) get a usb stick or a usb drive. even if it does not boot from usb you can boot with a floppy that has a kernel with usb support on it, and install from there.
4) pop out the harddrive and connect it using a usb interface to another machine (a techie friend my have this.)
5) go to your LUG (linux user group) and ask around. better yet: email your local LUG's mailing list and have people bring out their setup disks and hardware!

it's not as hard as you think! let us know your specs (i.e. usb, ethernet connection) and we'll try to tailor something that works!
posted by ori at 11:07 AM on November 17, 2005

Fedora Core is probably the worst possible distro for a PI machine with 16 megs of ram...go Slackware, IMO, or Debian.
posted by ori at 11:08 AM on November 17, 2005

I do not have USB... I do not have a connection to the internet with this device. This thing is about as unversatile as it gets. I think it's from about 95-96. I will continue to consider suggestions though, thanks so much for your help.
posted by cloeburner at 11:10 AM on November 17, 2005

Damn Small Linux, maybe?
posted by brownpau at 11:12 AM on November 17, 2005

Here's an idea that's crazy enough that it just might work.

There are lots of "live" Linux distros that can be run straight from the CD, like Knoppix. Well, you can also run Knoppix (and perhaps other live distributions) right off of the hard drive from an ISO. So, if your hard drive is big enough for a Knoppix ISO, you could give this a try. You could drop the ISO onto the hard drive by hooking it up to another computer through USB or a laptop IDE/IDE converter.
posted by yarmond at 11:15 AM on November 17, 2005

what the hell did people do back in 1995? i know linux didn't just appear yesterday. what about slackware 1.0 or something? stuff like that HAD to come floppy-sized. if it isn't connected to the internet it really doesn't matter if it's old and insecure, maybe?
posted by soma lkzx at 11:26 AM on November 17, 2005

The laptop IDE/IDE converter is a good option if you have a regular PC with CDROM laying about. You could hook up the laptop drive as the primary disk on the desktop machine, install whichever linux distro you prefer (Debian'd be my choice, but Redhat's not a bad choice and will do a lot of hardware autodetect for you). Once the install is complete, pop the drive back in your laptop and likely as not it will boot just fine.
posted by roue at 11:27 AM on November 17, 2005

Picking up a USB PCMCIA card might be useful. Once you've got USB, you should be able to load it off an external hard drive, if you have one.
posted by Espy Gillespie at 11:29 AM on November 17, 2005

Picking up a USB PCMCIA card might be useful. Once you've got USB, you should be able to load it off an external hard drive, if you have one.

Except that PCM support for older laptops has been dropped from the most recent kernels. So you'll need an old distro. And it will never have a wireless connection because any linux driver for a compatible wireless card will never run on a distro old enough to support the PCM slots.
posted by Mayor Curley at 11:33 AM on November 17, 2005

what the hell did people do back in 1995?

They ran the Linux distributions that were generally available in 1995. You're familiar with the wonders of trying to get by in Windows 95 in 2005; the same thing applies to Linux, except much more so, since in 1995 Linux still was pretty much under the radar of anyone other than geeks, and the idea of it being a Windows-replacing desktop OS for the general public was still distant future.

Linux didn't exist at all until 1991, remember; by 1995 it was up-and-coming, but given that the ten years since then accounts for more than 2/3 of its entire history, and its growth has been better than linear, you can imagine what sort of differences you're going to see between Linux distributions contemporary to your hardware and modern versions.

You could start there, I suppose, but you'd find that you couldn't run all of the software that everyone recommends, that your machine would be full of unpatched security holes,

While modern Linuxes can usually get more performance out of hardware than Windows can, that presupposes that the hardware isn't antique; it's just more efficient, it can't work miracles. Because of that, throwing Linux on ancient hardware is, IMO, the worst way to discover what it can do, for exactly the same reasons that trying to get Windows XP to work on that machine would be the worst way to discover what Windows XP can do.
posted by mendel at 11:37 AM on November 17, 2005

Er, I mean:

You could start there, I suppose, but you'd find that you couldn't run all of the software that everyone recommends, that your machine would be full of unpatched security holes, that you'd have to search for 1995-era documentation on how to do things, that people on Usenet and various mailing lists and ask.me would have a hard time lending you a hand, and so on.
posted by mendel at 11:38 AM on November 17, 2005

Here's how to install Damn Small Linux from floppies. The article says "This process may cause excess stress and frustration. Not recommended for people with high blood pressure, a history of heart problems or aneurysms, pregnant women, or anybody else who is unable to cope with high levels of stress. [...] I recommend having at least 60 BRAND NEW floppys, so that you dont have to re-use the same floppy over and over and still have a few extras." And for all that this or Tiny Linux are still looking to me like your best bet so far.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 11:45 AM on November 17, 2005

I ran slackware in 1995 on a machine with similar specs to this (but with 64MB RAM). It will work, but it won't be very pretty. If you've never used Linux before it will feel like you are being dumped into DOS/cmdline hell circa 1988 or so. And if you run any GUIs performance will crawl.

Two very small (as in, run from floppy) and fast GUIs that I remember well from around then were and a TSR called GeoWorks (runs on top of basically any DOS, such as FreeDOS or OpenDOS). You should be able to download old install images of these.

I hear there's a QNX 6, but it has higher memory and CPU demands.
posted by meehawl at 12:12 PM on November 17, 2005

Hm, QNX 4 got lost in bad tag shuffle. Sorry!
posted by meehawl at 12:15 PM on November 17, 2005

An interesting option from the Slack folks, Zip Slack. Old zip drives must be getting pretty cheap these days. Net install is also going to be easier than getting the drive out or trying to get some wierd USB chain running.

That old system probably isn't going to be too happy running X, meaning WYSIWIG text editing is mostly out. That being said, I had a fairly long and happy relationship using a miniamlist OpenBSD install on nearly identical hardware as yours using Emacs*, creating in effect a "digital typewriter". It was liberating to my writing since I wasn't going to (or really able to) fuss over nontextual details.

Text-only doesn't mean that you can't still do some high-level presentation stuff if you're willing to learn some minorly arcane stuff like TeX.

* - haters can bite it.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 12:24 PM on November 17, 2005

Word processing? On 16MB of RAM? Stick to Windows 95. You'll never be able to run a Linux graphical word processor with so little RAM.

I wouldn't mess with the laptop unless you've got the Win 95 install floppies. They're pretty much impossible to find anymore, so if you mess up with Linux and want to go back to Windows, you're screwed.
posted by exhilaration at 1:17 PM on November 17, 2005

^^ on second thought, I agree with mendel and exhilaration.
posted by ori at 3:13 PM on November 17, 2005

exhilaration: Bootdisk.com for all your boot disk needs.
posted by TimeFactor at 3:32 PM on November 17, 2005

This Rocks.
It can be booted from nearly anything besides a floppy and is highly user friendly for newbs. OS on USB is nice.
posted by IronLizard at 4:02 PM on November 17, 2005

oops, nevermind. memory no good.
posted by IronLizard at 4:05 PM on November 17, 2005

This would be an excellent way to get to know Linux, but in the same way that constructing a car from scrap-yard pieces would be an excellent way to undertand how a car works.

Okay, I'm exaggerating... but you get the idea.

Having said that, you could definitely get something to work. It seems to me that you have a few key issues:

1. Learning about Linux

2. Getting a functional word-processor working.

3. Making use of some spare hardware.

By installing Linux on your described kit, you will absolutely achieve item 1, but given your virgin status, this is not the best way of achieving this. Far better would be to play with a stable, well-supported version of Linux on decent hardware.

As for 2, the de-facto standard for desktop word processing is Microsoft Word. While OpenOffice is making steady inroads onto the desktop, and can claim decent compatability with Microsoft, Word has a huge chunk of the market. Do you need other people to read files you send them? Do the files have to look exactly the same as they do on your screen? Do the other people use Word? If the answer to these is yes, then you probably want to use Word too. (Not to advocate Word, I'm just dealing in real-world concerns for a non-techie).

Item 3... well, you could just give it away. Or you could find some sort of guide to optimising Windows 95 for that hardware, and work out how best to make it perform to your requirements.

As for a particular version of Linux, you should find the most up-to-date version that is known to work on your hardware. This may be a problem. Don't go for an old version - it will be unsupported by the distributor and by online advice communities.

Also, as has been said here, you are not going to get a decent understanding of what a full-featured version of Linux can do. It will be like checking out Windows 95 to see what Windows XP is like. Not representative.

My recommendation would be to find a very patient friend or someone on the intraweb who could do it for you, and sit there with them while they do the install. Buy them a lot of beer - but only after they've finished :-)

Oh - if you're the sort of person who has to resort to manuals and online help often during the daily running of whatever it is you do with your current computer, then you are unlikely to come out of this smiling. More knowledgeable yes, but smiling, no.
posted by ajp at 4:37 PM on November 17, 2005

Look for an old PCMCIA SCSI card and external SCSI CDROM drive. At work we had an expensive Pinnacle external SCSI CD burner during that era - it had drivers and backup software for both Win 3.1 and 95.
posted by rfs at 8:42 PM on November 17, 2005