[GLLUG] Help - Installing Linux from a USB drive

Matt Graham danceswithcrows at usa.net
Tue Aug 23 14:25:34 EDT 2005


On Tuesday 23 August 2005 13:53, after a long battle with technology, 
eduardo cesconetto wrote:
> I got a cute Toshiba Portege PII 300 w/ floppy and USB, but no CD,
> and the BIOS won't let me choose the USB as [a boot device].

A PII-300 is old enough that that doesn't surprise me one bit.

> I need to install any linux distro w/X (kde or gnome..)

KDE and GNOME will be slower than dirt on a PII-300.  You'd want to use 
fluxbox or fvwm2 on something this old.

> from the usb cdrom. I tried using RedHat's 6.2 floppy to begin the 
> install, but it can't find my external cdrom

Redhat 6.2 is probably too old to understand USB Mass Storage devices.  
The 2.2 kernels were pretty much incapable of working with USB.  You 
need to use a newer distro, or use a distro that can be installed from 
floppies.  Older Slackware distros could install a base system from 
floppies, then you could copy other packages over via the net.  I think 
that boot floppies were available for the SuSE 7.n series, and at least 
some of the SuSE 7.n series shipped with 2.4 kernels.

Whatever you do, you'll be frustrated with the speed of this machine if 
you try to run anything like OOO or Firefox or KDE.  Caveat user.

-- 
   Three disks for /usr/bin under the Sun
   Seven for the workers paging through their E-mails
   Nine disks for hackers getting programs to run
   One for the Sys Admin when the system fails
      One RAID to rule them all, One RAID to bind them
      One RAID to hold the files and in the darkness grind them
   In the land of Server where the Unix lies....
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see


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