Compaq LTE 5200

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 12:18:16PM -0400, Gregory D Hough wrote:
> I have this relic and would like to make it useful in some way. It is 
> 120Mhz, with 40 MB and a 1.35GB drive. There is no CDROM and I haven't 
> had any luck finding one. I was able to acquire a docking station for it 
> which has two bays. One bay provides a second floppy device and there is 
> room for a CDROM. The docking station also provides a network device.
> 
> I have made some progress so far. I used a Slackware bareapm.i bootdisk 
> to install a 2.2 kernel and a few packages over NFS. It can now be 
> booted on its own and I have full network functionality (lynx, ftp, 
> ssh). The machine has gcc 2.95.3 and 350 MB free on an ext3 file system. 
> I gave it 130 MB swap.
> 
> Is it at all possible to bring this old thing to a 2.6 on its own one 
> build at a time? I'm just a regular RPM guy and am not sure how to 
> proceed with all this MAKE stuff. In other words, if it can be done do I 
> start by building a new kernel and then the compiler and glibc? There 
> must be a method to this kind of madness.

You could just go install Debian on it.  I run Debian on a 486/66 with
48M ram and you can certainly easily fit in 1.3G.  It even comes with a
2.6 kernel so you don't have to go compile anything.  Debian still
supports 386's although through some kernel instruction emulation caused
by glibc 2.3 requirements of 486 or better processors.

You can install debian as long as you have a network connection and a
floppy drive, and can start the netinstall using the boot, root and net
floppy images.  The rest it can get over the network link.  I have done
that method before.

A cdrom install is simpler (slightly), but if you don't have a cdrom
drive, that doesn't help.

Lennart Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml