Installing Linux on old hardware is always a challenge. You basically need to the specifications of all the hardware and Linux will do the rest. You also need to know how to install Linux. Since the only way to install Linux on this laptop was by floppy, I needed to find a distro that had a floppy installation. I found numerous floppy based Linux distro Here.

I'm a Slackware fan so I was determine to find a Slackware floppy based distro. I finally found Tiny Linux on the web. If you want more information on Tiny Linux, just click on the link provide at the top of the photo Album. After some research, I found out that Tiny Linux is based off Slackware 4.0. I was pretty happy with my finding.

I followed the instructions provide by Tiny Linux and with in an hour, I had a working laptop with Tiny Linux installed. Even though it was a walk in the park installing Tiny Linux, I needed to tweak the distro in order to configure the laptop's hardware. For all the Linux users out there, I configured lilo, fstab, groups, X, and rc scripts.

Tiny Linux was able to recognize my 10MB PCMCIA Ethernet Card. Once I had internet capabilities, I was able to download Slackware 4.0 .tgz packages with easy using wget application. I used the following commands to download, install, remove, and update.

# wget -rl0 --no-parent http://.../x1 -A.tgz  ---> Downloading multiple X applications
# installpkg *.tgz  ---> Installing multiple applications
# removepkg *.tgz  ---> Removing applications to save space
# updatepkg *.tgz  ---> Updating packages