Linux Laptop w/ 3.5" Disk, USB, and No Hard Drive? 396
ryewell asks: "I have an IBM Thinkpad 390 Laptop, PII 266Mhz, 128 MB RAM, with USB 1.0 port and a 3.5 floppy drive being the most important stats I would assume for this question. So my hard drive died, and I've been using a DOS boot disk and a program called Mel to do my word processing.Would it be possible to boot the laptop in Linux using a 3.5 disk, then using drivers access the USB memory stick that had an adequate Linux system on it?" With USB thumb drives getting to be as large as 512 megs, memory sticks weighing in at 1 gig, and Compact Flash cards getting into the 2 gig range, this might not be such a bad idea. There's the Linux Mobile System that looks to implement something like this, but are there other distributions or similar projects that might be of interest? If you were going to put together a custom system for something like this, how would you do it?
"If Linux can be configured this way, I would need no hard drive, and the created docs/info could be saved on the USB drive memory stick. This way, no hard drive means no moving parts, which means better battery life, and I won't have to buy a hard drive which at the best deal I can find is about $130 US after taxes, shipping, etc. And how cool would it be to run a laptop off of a memory stick! Unfortunately, I know nothing about Linux, but this might be a cool problem to solve for those smart and knowledgeable enough to figure it out. Thanks for any help you can provide!"
Boot Everywhere Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
Ignorant Stab...but a stab nonetheless... (Score:2, Interesting)
All you need... (Score:5, Interesting)
Make a short script to mount the external media on boot up, and install everything you need from there.
Obviously, having another computer running a BSD or Linux distro will greatly help you achieve this.
Don't be surprised if the fruits of your labor yield a very fast graphical linux box.
Win98 (Score:5, Interesting)
Everything runs fine and I'm not even using a stripped down linux (which I'm sure would smoke!).
Give me your old hardware.
Re:Probably Knoppix (Score:3, Interesting)
My plan is to come up with a boot image that will spit out only busybox, the stuff I absolutely need, do DHCP configuration (probably in the kernel) and contact an X server via XDMCP. But then, I don't want to use it for a computer, just an X terminal.
Knoppix from USB--been done (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:I would not use MemoryStick (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why Bother? (Score:2, Interesting)
You don't know me very well, do you?
You can get a decent Laptop for less money. Put the laptop on the driveway and drive over it.
Assuming you spend that time at some job being recompensed, yeah, I guess. If you spend it at home watching Farscape reruns. .
I've had three laptops in the past four years, the last two I owned aren't even good enough for my kids anymore.
Ahhhhh, a dream cusotmer, step right this way sir, the web is waiting, and I don't mean the "World Wide."
My ten year old 486 laptop still does serious work, often booting off of a single floppy Linux distro, Mu Linux, which this gentleman could also use, install on his HD and rebuild a system from there, all while watching TV at no out of pocket expense.
Time may not be free, but a good deal of it goes unpaid anyway, unless you care to recompense me for taking out my own trash and watching Farscape?
KFG
Re:quit being a cheap bastard (Score:4, Interesting)
b) Maybe he'd like to use that Linux/USB combo elsewhere
c) Maybe he just likes to try a geeky project
I'd be kinda cool if you could have your system everywhere with a floppy and an USB key (much more typical than USB boot, at least).
Kjella
Performance tips (Score:2, Interesting)
With a 266MHz system, you're going to need to be careful about the weight of the software you run.
First, skip any of the major Office varieties for Linux (OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, etc.)
If your laptop can take more RAM, install it. You'll need it. For my ThinkPad 760XL, installation of the SO-DIMMS wasn't too hard.
If you possibly can, do without X. That'll save you a world of time, especially when loading your OS off a USB flash disk. If you need X, go with a lightweight windowmanager, like twm [plig.org]. If that's a bit too extreme, try oroborus [oroborus.org].
You're going to want as little memory footprint as possible. However, you're still probably going to need swap space, so I'd recommend against a flash device. Get one of the USB hard drives.
That's all I can really think of ATM.
In terms of desktop... (Score:3, Interesting)
GNOME and a recent distro simply with unnecessary software / services removed might not even be too bad on a 128MB machine (just don't try KDE!)
How-switch, Multi-OS capability? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think my ideas below and my question above come from my curiosity of how long the portable/hand-held DVD players last. I also wonder how long MP3 device batteries last. Days? Aside from the LCD and CPU chewing up maybe 60% of the battery life, at LEAST the storage and boot and system file devices could be on CF/Smart Media. Maybe someone might want to take the LSB to a new level: Optimizing the installation and locating of system files based on the type of medium to which the OS and user files are being written during install. And, suspend-to-disk, ACPI, and APM problems could be made to go away to a good extent, probably because the disk spinning is eliminated. i am not sure about communicating devices (modems and NICs), tho.
Imagine this:
-- Multi-slot CF/Smart-Media bay
-- O/S Memory sticks/ in each CF/SM bay
-- Energy-efficient/Solar or ambient-light-powered LCD
-- Ability to swap O/S on the fly
-- IR or compatible/comparable input device with own power supply (like the battery-powered Logitech mice...)
Can't laptops go Solid State now? I imagine much of the laptop industry is sustained by momentum to keep cranking out mechanical disks. If an efficient CF/SM platter or storage surface can be optically read by something that is not having to spin at some 7,000 or 10,000 RPM, a lot of other savings might be made.
Also, it seems laptop boards have fewer and fewer soldered components. Further reductions should lead to greater opportunity to bring solid-state laptops to consumer hands. If the OS could be on one the disk, and be swappable, the data on another swappable, disk, then when will a light switch on to make solid-state laptops that hold VMWare or Win4Lin in a Linux environment? VMWare and NeTraverse could then reduce their costs of product just by jumping to distribution/deployment of millions vice 10s of thousands. This would probably devastate ms' foothold, especially of XUL or XML or other code and W3C standards were followed better.
*BSD (Score:3, Interesting)
Related question... (Score:3, Interesting)
I have an ancient laptop with a broken keyboard. The HD/FD are both fine, as are the PCMCIA slots. No CDROM.
What I would like to do is boot a single-diskette that contains enough code to fire up the PCMCIA networking, and either ENBD [uc3m.es] or something like it.
That way, I could mount the HD in the laptop as a remote block device, and copy an OS across.
Any ideas?
Junk on ebay (Score:5, Interesting)
I buy lots of laptop stuff on ebay and I rebuild IBM lappys as a hobby. Back when I first started doing this I looked at the price of brand new, fully warranteed drives and decided to just buy a few cheap used ones. Of the three I bought (for a total of more than $100) I have zero functional units less than six months later. The first one (Sony - I should have known) accepted a format and then started clicking a week later, the second (Fujitsu) lasted a couple of months. The genuine IBM drive lasted almost four months before it, too, started clicking one day while at the library - just as I was about to complete a 4GB ISO download.
From then on I buy "expensive" new drives with warranties. Spending $100 on a new drive every couple of years makes a hell of a lot more sense than spending $30 every other month on JUNK.
Speaking more directly to the topic, my latest pet is a 500MHz 600 that is being fitted with a custom case and battery pack and internal USB hub and wireless. It will have only one external PCMCIA slot because the other will be permanently occupied by a USB2 card (which will, in turn, talk to the internal wireless USB dongle and USB 10/100 NIC) - but I will be able to refit my machine to a speedy 750MHz or more at my leisure, spare parts are dirt cheap, and I won't have to be a slave to the $60 semi-annual Lithium toss, instead just replacing NiMH cells as they expire.
And the way I'm making room for much of this is by replacing the $80 20GB 2.5" drive with a cool new $110 20GB 1.8" drive. Just a few slight internal adjustments and my one-off geekpad will become the one to rule the world via USB!
menuet (Score:2, Interesting)
Can we get a little more info on your intended use (Score:3, Interesting)
If it's the latter, do you have a network and at least one other machine? If so, how about a TFTP and network boot? I'm not sure if you have a boot rom in your laptop but it's possible or maybe you could find a cheap network card for it with one. Once the laptop's booted up it should be fine as long as it stays attatched to whatever network FS it needs to read files off of.
I assume your bios does not allow boot from usb, so that's kinda out... Again, if it's a "static" laptop, one option might be a 44->40 pin IDE adapter, run the wire out of the case, and hook it to a standard 3.5" HD and use an old AT powersupply to keep it spinning. I'm just trying to think up ways to fix this thing with the typical "junk" around the average geek's house. I know there's usually half a ton of old cables, drives, cpus, cards etc in mine. If you're working on the premise that $130 is too much to spend I'd suspect that digging for junk or getting it from a friend may be an option in your case.
flonix + GRUB (Score:2, Interesting)
Get a Grip; Dummy Fuck! (Score:1, Interesting)
As eight out of the first ten posts rightly pointed out, your going to spend the cost of a replacement hard drive for a kludge fix, not that you couldn't drop by a computer salvage yard and accomplish that mission for less than half the price of new. This is not obvious? No, this is Slashdot where you can be instructed to floppy boot linux into a ramdisk image off a usb flash drive... and then... and then.....
Don't you know these guys ENJOY doing this to other people. Hell, they enjoy doing it to THEMSELVES. Your asking for trouble here. Stick to the main roads. Think of your children. For Gods sake man!
I HAVE AN EVEN BETTER IDEA!!!!!!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
In my spare time, for the past fifteen months, I've been writing my own low-level logic, which can be blown onto an EEPROM chip. The EEPROM chip is then soldered to a project board (Radio Shack P/N 26-117B) along with the necessary connectors and solid-state circuitry to allow you to use the spare (32k) memory in the popular "Speak N Spell" series of educational toys as a CompactFlash device!
With the addition of a CompactFlash-to-USB adapter, one can use this setup just like a regular USB storage device! Think of the Linuxing you can do with that!
- A.P.