Re: your mail

[" Raymond A. Ingles" <inglesra@frc.com>]

On Tue, 14 Sep 1999, Ton Hamerslag wrote:

> Dear debian-user. I have a IBM 386sx 55 machine with 4 MB RAM and
> a harddisk of 80 MB. I want to make a linux server of that machine.
> The only thing this machine also has is a floppy drive, no cd-rom.
> Which software must I download and what needs to be done to install
> Linux on this machine.(For example do I need Bootup floppy's). O don't
> know how to start. Please help me. Greetings, Ton Hamerslag.

 What, exactly, will you be serving with this machine? It would probably
work well as a firewall/router/IPmasq setup for a small-to-medium office.
You might be able to make it a print server, but you'd have to make sure
you had enough disk space to spool large files. And you'd probably need
more disk for an Intranet web server.

 I have installed Debian on a 386 w/6MB or RAM and two 40-MB disks. It
wasn't terribly difficult, but it wasn't trivial either. Take a look at
"http://www.debian.org/releases/slink/i386/ch-install-methods.en.html#s-install-floppies";,
which describes how to install Debian from floppies. Since it only has 4MB
of RAM, you'll probably need to use the "lowmem.bin" disk image.

 If you're planning on making this box a server, I assume that it's on a
network? In that case, things are a bit simpler. You can boot the system
into Debian, and then load files off the network. If you have another
Debian machine on the network with a CD-ROM drive, that's ideal. You can
access the CD over the network and install what you like. (That's what I
did on my 386...)

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles        (248) 377-7735        ray.ingles@fanucrobotics.com

 "Is knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know this?" -- Woody Allen