Installing Debian on a stubborn laptop
Hi folks
I have an old Toshiba 110CS laptop[1] that I'm trying to get Woody on to.
After a few false starts I managed to get it booted and into the first
stage of installation. It didn't like the first driver disk, but six
floppies later I managed to find a disk it liked, and then it failed
unpacking the drivers.tgz file it had built. Restarting from scratch
several times still couldn't get it past that point.
The next move was to try for a pcmcia boot disk, that would let me use
either my vaio cdrom drive, or a network card to get the appropriate
file. As I had the Red Hat 7.3 cds, I thought I'd try the pcmcia boot
disks from there, but they just complain that there is insufficient ram
to install it, even in text and rescue mode.
After that, I managed to hook it up to my home lan booting with tomsrtbt.
That took a couple of goes - the floppy drive seems to be on its last
legs :( I've now got the local hard drive mounted and also an nfs share
from my server. What I'd like to do now is copy a base debian system over
from my server to the laptop drive, then chroot into it, setup LILO, and
boot direct from the hard disk. Then I'd just carry on with a network
install, assuming I have pcmcia support.
Now my questions: Does the base Debian system exist on the Woody cds in a
form I can copy, or maybe somewhere else on the net? If not, how can I
construct one? Does this sound workable and/or is there a more Debian way
to do it?
Regards, Martin
[1] Pentium 100, 16Mb RAM, 845Mb hd, floppy drive only.
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