Hi everyone, good to be back hehe, havnt been on AD for a while now, and to think i used to post everyday! hehe anyway, back to the problem. Sorry for the long story, but i guess its the only way to explain the whoel problem fully! I have a Toshiba Portege 2010 (no optical drives - grrr) and id like to install linux on it, i think for my distro im going for mandriva, as i like the style and it seems pretty user friendly, im not completely new to linux, as i used to play around with ubuntu, but im nowhere near to an expert! so here my problem, installation! With a lack of an optical drive its VERY hard to install anything, i believe i installed xp a while back by copying over the entire i386 folder to a partition and installing all from there (i have a usb floppy drive that i borrowed off of someone and that seemed to work from boot, so i did everything from there - the dos prompt). I did actualyl manage to get into the installer last night by booting from grub into the installer, so as i thought it was all working, i click format the drive and hoped for the best! stupidly enough, i forgot to copy over the media folder, and it wouldnt let me continue, so im left with an empty harddrive and i cant even run grub as the files have all been wiped from windows. (i followed the instructions on the mandriva site for local harddisk installations) i have a USB dvd drive that works on other laptops, but apparently the portege doesnt boot from many cd drives, and i dont think i can get hold of the ones that it does boot from. i also have a pcmcia dvd drive that also is not detected at startup, however i think i can load the driver from the cmd prompt, when inserting a floppy. So after that long story (sorry again), im stuck, and have no idea how im going to get linux onto this laptop, with the XP installation, i vaguely remember copying over the folder and then running winnt.exe, but i dont think there is anything like this with linux, please prove me wrong and help Thanks alot. Ben
If you can boot from a USB stick, http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ Also search google for stuff relating to the Eee - it too doesn't have an optical drive, and it has a fairly huge installed base. I got one the other week, and have used that Unetbootin successfully, but being 5 years old, if you can't boot from USB stick you might have a hard time.
yeh, thanks alot for the reply, i dont think it is bootable from USB, and funnily enough my brother has an eeepc and he has installed his which is why i actually want linux, as i liked it on his eee, running out of ideas, ive stumbled upn the idea of a network install via pxe, but i have absolutely no idea how to do it, im searching up tutorials but getting stuck as most expect you to know alot about the network etc. hmmm...
That comes down to your network... what happens is.. you set up the install image on a network server somewhere and then boot from floppy to access it (if the bios doesn't do pxe boot) I know how solaris does it, but linux.. it's something I have never tried. The best guide I know of (written by humans from experience.. not geeks from a textbook) http://polishlinux.org/installation/installing-linux-over-network-no-cd-drive/
thanks alot for the information, right now ive started an install with ubuntu via the PXE method, and its going ok, ill write back to say how it goes.
right, very sorry! had some problems with my net! I was and am able to use the network installs, so far ive only used ubuntu as its the easiest to install over the network and its installed fine after a few tweaks of the setup, however the poor portege cant handle it, so now ive got to find one more suited to it. i was wondering if any of you guys n gals know any good distros to install on it, preferable ones that look nice Thanks alot, Ben
Why don't you give straight debian a go.. and fluxbox and rox for the desktop instead of the very heavyweight gnome. Install just the core system then apt-get the bits you need. Simple lean and mean. I have one built on a p2 266 which runs happily in 32mb's of ram.. usually eating up about 14MB's.. Now what did I do with my screnshot. Heres a howto.. with many good hints.. just install the core system instead of the desktop then add only what you want http://www.wikihow.com/Configure-Fluxbox
