[Cialug] what distros were out in 1996?

[cialug@cialug.org]

That reminds me, I've been meaning to ask a question.  I have a laptop with no
CD-Rom, but I have an external one hooked up via a SCSI-II connection.  Of
course, I can't boot off of the external CD-Rom drive.  I found an "sbm.bin"
which is supposedly a floppy image for a boot manager.  However, I couldn't get
it to work.  Is there something out there that I can use, or am I stuck making a
boot floppy for the distro, and using it?  I wanted to try a Live CD distro, so
I'm not sure if there's a boot floppy for it.

--
Tim W.


> Nathan C. Smith wrote:
> > There are several distros that will run on an older pentium or 486.  The
> > biggest issue is getting the installation started.  You may need to check
> > the BIOS to make sure the machine can boot from CD-ROM.  Some older machines
> > couldn't boot from CD-ROM.
> 
> Indeed, I still boot that old laptop of mine off a floppy.
> 
> I was unable to find a suitable-sized laptop hard drive to install, so I 
> had to figure out a way to use the existing, annoyingly-just-under-2-gig 
> hard drive.  I ended up copying the ISO to the hard drive and creating a 
> boot floppy.  That way, I could unhook the external CD-ROM drive and 
> have a nice, compact system for the kitchen counter.
> 
> Someday, I'll either get a slightly larger HD and do a full install, or 
> I'll at least take the time to figure out how to transfer the 
> boot-to-image config over to the HD and get rid of the boot floppy.
> 
> BTW: The battery life on that old thing is phenomenal.  I can VNC into 
> my laptop upstairs for about 4 or 5 hours!  That's probably a 
> side-effect of loading the CD image off the HD instead of running it off 
> the HD.
> 
> later,
> kristau
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