Linux on 486 laptop with no CD drive??

[chapmc]

I have an old Thinkpad 486-75 with hard drive and floppy but no CD drive. It has no OS and I am wondering if there is a version of Linux that is small and can be installed from floppy without needing a CD drive. Perhaps do internet and play solitaire.
Any suggestions will be appreciated.

[willy_ph]

Umm, it's pretty unlikely that you'll be able to play any decent games on a 486. The only thing I think it can do is work as a router/firewall setup. Anything else is pushing that little system to the extreme.

[nukes]

Is there a network card in it?
Some games would be playable, maybe. Nothing 3d or anything though. I trust its a 486DX (as opposed to an SX) if its an SX I wouldn't bother.
The difference being the DX has a math coprocessor (487 I think) built in, whereas the SX doesn't. I wouldn't like to run a machine like that nowadays, but it should be possible, so long as you can live without bloat like KDE etc. Just use blackbox as the WM and don't do silly things like framebuffer display etc.

[Peter M]

You can use parallel or PCMCIA connected CD-ROM drives to install Linux.

[originel]

you could try zipSlack It's small...can be installed using floppies (takes 30 floppies) which would give you a full linux install minus X...also it can be (and was designed to) install on a single DOS partition. It would take some work to get it to work (afterall, it is slack), but it would give you a good base to get online and download everything else.

If your really good you could use LOAF...i messed with it but could never get it to work. but it comes on a single floppy.

Actually i just remembered tiny linux. it's very small and it looks like it already comes with X

[chapmc]

Thanks for the suggestions. I don't know much about Linux but I am going to give it a try. I've been doing some searches also. Do you know anything about Lute Linux? The website shows 2 floppy images to download for install. http://www.lutelinux.com/indexgif.html

[originel]

that seems like an ok distro

i've never heard of it, so i can't say for sure. Also the fact that it looks very corporate kinda puts me on guard, but that's another story.

Looks like you will have to install and configure X yourself, which is something i have yet to even touch, but if you are determined you can prolly get it working. I would be wary of how much X support you will truly have, considering it is just 2 floppies (i've never heard of X being compressed that much) and you might have to install drivers and such yourself. it can all be done, just be ready to get your feet wet

good luck

[nukes]

Do you have a laptop hard disk adapter so you can plug it into your desktop? You could probably install Slackware or Debian on it that way, then stick it back in and finish it off. You wouldn't get Mandrake on there as it wouldn't run. (compiled for i586) plus it would be really slow anyway. Maybe you could post the specs and extra stuff like if you have a network card or laplink cable, or even a PCMCIA cdrom.

[chapmc]

My problem is I don't have external CD except usb which won't connect because no usb on old laptop. I can hook hd to my desktop but it's a real pain to disassemble it from the carrier and then reassemble. I downloaded the floppies for "tiny linux" and got it installed but I have some problems to work out with the install.
A question.. if I had an ethernet PCMCIA card would it connect to my desktop using a dos? program that would boot from floppy?

[nukes]

If you had a PCMCIA network card, you could just install Linux using a debian boot disk or something after setting up an NFS or FTP share on the desktop. There would be no need for DOS. Debian has bootdisks for this purpose here:
http://www.debian.org/distrib/floppyinst
PS: Please post the specs so we know what we're dealing with.