[RULE] Serial cable install

[Steven Fullmer]

> The first thought I had was that you could start
> with a floppy-sized distro and use that to get
> the most basic system installed (no apps, no
> subsystems, etc.).  Then, use floppies to piece
> to together your system using the
> Linux-From-Scratch documentation.  You could copy
> packages over one at a time by floppy.  It would
> be excruciating, but you'd learn a *lot* and it
> sounds like that's your goal.

I'd at least have to agree with the "excruciating" part.  I'm afraid
that the floppy disk itself would melt into a metallic/plastic goo
from all the disk access!

> Then I thought of something more reasonable... 

Yes, please!

> If you can, take out the hard drive and connect
> it to another system (with network, CDROM, etc.)
> and do the install there.  Then just put the hard
> drive back in the ol' clunker.  This is probably
> the *fastest* way you'll get a distro on that
> machine.  If your goal is to learn by actually
> *using* the system, then you don't want to get
> bogged down in a torturous installation.

My question about this is, which other system?  This is actually
the only laptop I've got and since it's a bit of a legacy, I don't
even know if it would fit in someone else's computer.  I have an
AMD 2600+ computer that I would connect up to with CDROM and/or
hard drive that I can install from (no network card in the laptop,
though, so I can work with serial/parallel cables or the modem.
So I need to know if that's what I need to do to install it.

> The only problem will be hooking up this old
> laptop drive to another system.  What kind of
> connector is on that drive?

What do you mean by the connector?  The hard drive?  The
serial/parallel port?  Do you think I should just unscrew the
thing and plug its floppy drive directly into one of my drives
and see if it transfers?  :)

>>  From: "Steven Fullmer" <Steven_Fullmer at tni.com>
>> 
>> It is an IBM 486sx Thinkpad, 8 MB RAM, running
>> Win 3.1 on MSDOS 5.02 (ouch!) with a monocrome
>> LCD.  It has no CDROM drive, but it has a 3 1/2"
>> floppy, serial/parallel cable ports, and a modem
>> (don't know the baud... probably 9600)...  I
>> believe it has just under 200 MB of harddrive total.
>> 
>> From the above options, what would you suggest I
>> do to install RH?  I've never used
>> serial-to-serial, or modem-to-modem before.  I
>> understand that I would most likely benefit from
>> a boot disk image.  I assume that bootnet.img
>> wouldn't be what I want since I'm not using a
>> network card.  (But who knows?  Maybe I do.)  If
>> you could let me know, it would be great to get
>> me started in setting up.

Thanks Jason for the help.

Steven


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