[Gllug] Linux installation conundrum

[Richard Jones]

Situation: very old laptop which lacks (working) floppy or a CD drive
of any sort. However it's running an ancient copy of Red Hat (4.2 or
5.2 or something!) with a 2.2.17 kernel.

It has working PCMCIA, and I have CF cards, network cards, etc. all
working fine.

I'd very much like to get Debian onto this machine. My problem is
booting the initial kernel. Given that I can copy any required files
onto the laptop either over the network or on CF cards, is it at all
possible to get the Debian installer booted on this system? I'm
thinking some sort of "boot Linux within Linux" option.

It would be nice if I could copy the rescue, root and driverNN
floppies to the HD and have it (somehow) boot and run them all.

Or is there some other way to get Debian onto this machine?

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Red Hat Inc. (London) and Merjis Ltd. http://www.merjis.com/
http://www.annexia.org/ Freshmeat projects: http://freshmeat.net/users/rwmj
PTHRLIB is a library for writing small, efficient and fast servers in C.
HTTP, CGI, DBI, lightweight threads: http://www.annexia.org/freeware/pthrlib/

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug