[RULE] Serial cable install

[Jason Bechtel]

I've never done an install over serial either and
I once tried to do a backup over parallel and it
didn't work very well.

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.

Then I thought of something more reasonable... 
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.

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

Good luck!
Jason


---- Begin Original Message ----
 From: "Steven Fullmer" <Steven_Fullmer at tni.com>
Sent: Tue, 10 Jun 2003 14:07:36 -0600
Subject: [RULE] Serial cable install

I have an old laptop that I would like to use for
very basic RH 8 installation (so I can learn
Linux while at work).  

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.

I've not used Linux before so just want to use it
to familiarize myself with commands (and take
advantage of man/info pages).  It doesn't need
any graphical interface (seeing its specs, you
can see why :).

>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.

Steven

---- End Original Message ----



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