Does any one know where i can get the floppy installation disks to any form of linux or BSD? Got an old computer i want to monkey around w/ but it has no cd rom, net. card or anything.

ive been told slackware linux can be installed w/ a pure floppy installation and free BSD too, but it cant find anywhere to get the images for the floppies.

Thanx in adv.

well the slackware you get the images off the cdrom, not sure about their site though. don't know about any others though.

At the Slackware FTP site you can get a really small distribution using the Disk Sets.

Bootdisk 144 has the boot disks for high-density floppy. Root has the root disk for install.

During install, it'll ask what medium (floppy), and then what packages.

The only packages that will fit on a floppy nowadays are the "A" Packages, which are the Basic Install Packages. Each "A(1-16)" disk is a different disk needed during installation. From the looks of it, Slack 7.1 is the last version to have the install disks broken into floppy-sized pieces.

It's 18(!) disks total for install, including boot & root.

Ever thought about PLIP?

Net cards are less than $20 these days.

If you have windows setup to share your connection over a network you can get the netboot image from Redhat.

It is possible to install via ftp from ftp.redhat.com, you just need to know the directory structure to the setup image files. This can take a very long time to do, you need a stable connection and the bandwidth is limited on the ftp site, you could also use other sites that have the install files.

I have also used another machine with a cdrom and used http install with windows personal web server sharing the cdrom.
This is much faster than the ftp install.

For a lot of people that have trouble getting their network card to work, if it works for the install it will be working when you boot linux.






Install from harddrive is another option, which requires the files to be on it anyway so if you have a way to put the files on there you could just install it.

preciate the help. ill try to find the slackware disks on their ftp. what is PLIP? not famillar w/ that. oh and davidphillips, trust me i thought about other ways of installin. but its an old laptop w/ no room for an ethernet card. it does have a modem, but i really didnt want to do an ftp install. anywho. thnx for the help. if anyone can think of a better os to install in this situation please tell me.

one more thing...

maybe im retarded. but i went to slackwares ftp and can find the boot images and the root image, but cant find the actuall installation packages for f. disks. does anybody no the path or what section they would be under.

again thank you a million times!!!

Looks like you are on a different track here, but I did my first install of a laptop on a Compaq Aero 4/33C and I used an old PCMCIA netcard.

The screen was a killer. It only supports 640x480 16 colors.


PLIP is networking through the parallel port (printer port) and is a good solution for you if you will not have a Net card.

It uses a laplink cable for PLIP 0 and a different cable to do PLIP 1.


PLIP 0 cable

computer 1 computer 2

2 - 15 15 - 2
3 - 13 13 - 3
4 - 12 12 - 4
5 - 10 10 - 5
6 - 11 11 - 6
17 - 17 17 - 17
25 - 25 25 - 25

all other pins not connected
connect shield to case.

I've done a lot of FTP installs from suse and suse mirrors with only two floppys - one for boot and one for modules (net cards, scsi, etc...). Course ya would want a high-speed connection...

can i connect w/ PLIP if there isnt an os on the laptop?

I think that you can if you use NFS. As for boot disks, they are usually stored as .img files on the installation cd. With Red Hat for example, they are in a folder called 'images'. You can write the images to a floppy using the rawrite command under dos/windows or dd under *nix. There is a readme on rawrite (along with the filenames in question) in the /dosutils dir on the install CD.

Have fun!