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Installing linux on a machine

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xospec1alk

Diamond Member
OK, i have a gateway connected AOL touchpad. I had originally put winxp on it, and it runs sluggish as balls...so finally i have decided to give linux a whirl...

However...the touchpad has no cdrom, no floppy disk...

to get winxp on it, I started the installation on a different machine, and after it had finished copying the files over onto the new HD, I moved it over the the touchpad to finish the install...

is there a similar procedure i can do to get linux in particular gentoo on it?
 
It is pretty much the same deal. Do the install on another computer(onto the hard drive you wish to use, of course). Follow the directions given in the documentation but make all choices as appropriate for the computer you will be putting the disk into, not the one you are doing the install on(e.g. choosing the right kernel drivers and stuff.) Then, when you are done, just pop the drive into the touchpad and you are all set.

Alternatively, you can look up the directions for network booting, prep a harddisk for that, then use the network booted kernel and environment to build the local system. You'll need to swap hard disks in either case, and the former is somewhat simpler(since you won't need a bootserver) but the latter makes it easier to get at detailed system information during install (lspci, /dev/pci, etc.)

An additional note: if the said box cannot run XP very well, you really, really, really don't want to do the Gentoo install(especially a stage one) on that system if you can help it. Sure, there are masochists on the Gentoo boards who will tell you that you can do a stage one on a 486 with 16 megs of ram, and they may be right, but there is a reason that all their stories include phrases like "kde took a month to emerge" and "the bootstrap has been going for a week and still chugging away".
 
mmmm that mite be a problem then cuz its a cyrix chip with 16mb of ram or 32mb...i forget. wat distro do you recommend then?
 
You can still use Gentoo just fine. Just do the initial install on another computer(the fastest you can spare) and swap it in. and then, if you need to make any changes, use distcc. The Gentoo guys have a guide to setting distcc up and doing so will make things much, much faster. Distcc spreads out compiler jobs over the network to one or more other nodes, cluster computer style. This is cute but optional on fastish machines(last thing I installed Gentoo on was a 1.7 ghz PM, and I didn't need to set it up); but it is close to essential for slow machines.

If you don't want to mess with all that, I've heard good things about Debian.
 
Bah to gentoo. Bah to compiling your distro especially if you have a slow machine.

Depending on how much disk space your using up it, and if your using a fat32 partition you can install a Linux distro that uses umsdos filing system (umsdos is a filing system that run on fat32, but provides a sort of emulation for file system permissions that Fat32 lacks, but linux needs).

There are a few that will do that and be sorta fast. Although the umsdos is a performance hit compared to a conventional native file system. The main advantage is that they can be installed on the same partition as a Windows install, and will just be another directory when not in use.

I am thinking Vector Linux(it's not a umsdos OS, but it is designed specificly for older machines (486's and up)). It uses mimimal resources, and should run decently on old hardware, however it is ugly and uses "minimalist" versions of programs (like dillo browser in place of firefox, icewm in place of gnome). But if you want it is based off of, and is compatable with slackware packages. So you can get nice programs.

However the 'touchpad' thing bothers me. This is some sort of specialized peice of hardware, right? A "internet appliance" sort of thing? Some of those have little to no Linux support because they are so propriatory.

Do you have a link to describe the specs of the machine or something like that?
 
actually i've read that there are touchpad drivers widely available on linux and this particular machine...when i find time i'll get the specs up for you,
 
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