Gentoo on -ah- 'challenging' laptop: Libretto CT70

[barnacle]

After much gnashing and wailing of teeth, I've finally got a bootable Gentoo running on a Toshiba CT70.

Brief specs: 150MHz pentium I (it's been clocked from 120MHz); 32M memory; 6G hard drive; no USB, no Cardbus, no CDrom boot; no floppy except through bios, single PCMCIA slot (with Linksys 10/100 network/56k modem combo), and access to a cable modem.

Headlines: start with mandrake 7.1 and the network working - which you can do from windows or dos, or by stuffing the hard drive in a desktop machine. From there you can download the gentoo stage1 and start building, using the mandrake tools.

At present, about 24hrs compilation to the end of stage three, and six hours into the Xfree compile when I left it this morning.

I've been keeping notes as I go along - do people want a blow-by-blow account? Or wait till I have a fully working system? Or should I just blush at the excessive power of this state-of-the-art machine?

Neil
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Neil Barnes

[alec]

I'd love it if you narrated how you got from not having a CD-ROM to starting to install Gentoo. I just got my hands on an old IBM Thinkpad 701CS (486 w/ 8MB RAM and a 685MB hard disk!) that has an attachable floppy drive and no CD-ROM in sight.

[barnacle]

It's awkward , and I don't think you have enough hard disk to play the same game... However

I can't use toms root boot disk or any of the other mini linuxes - for some reason they won't run on my libretto. I think it's something to do with the floppy drivers being special bios thingies that talk to a pcmcia slot.

So, I load windows95 from a pile of floppies (I suppose I could do it from dos with the right point enabler for the network card) and use the MS share driver to copy the mandrake install CD (mounted on another windows machine) into another partition. (hda4)

Then I can load mandrake into the hda3 partition as it will boot from dos - that gives me a working linux and network card - which can talk to my firewall and cable service.

Now I get rid of the windows partitions, download the stage 1 ISO, and make the gentoo mounts. Then chroot to gentoo and follow the page...

The big snag with that is that you need a hundred meg to fit the w95 in, 250M for swap, 1G for the mandrake (with all the dev tools etc) and then the rest of the disk to fit gentoo in.

If you can find a linux boot disk (like tomsrtbt) that speaks to your floppy and you have a network card, you can probably do it all so much more easily
_________________
We apologise for the break in transmission. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Neil Barnes