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I have recently acquired for free a laptop from 1995. I haven't tried turning it on yet, (no power cord, should have one soon though), but I noticed that it has 8mb of RAM in it, and I currently have no way to know what size the hard drive is. On top of this, the only way to add any software to this is via a floppy disk drive.

I have no idea what type of architecture this build has, as I cannot find any resource on this brand of laptop (swan?).

Is there a version of Linux that would run on this machine?

jkt123
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Snappawapa
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  • Once up on a time I had a NetBSD running on an old™ ThinkPad (with an i486 and about 4MiB or 8MiB RAM… AFAIR rather 4MiB). You shouldn't be expecting too much, anyways (X11 for example would fall into this category). If you really want to run a recent Linux distro on this, you should look for some embedded variant (something with `uclibc` and `busybox` instead of `glibc` and `util-linux`/`core-utils`, etc.). As far as I remember, there's a x86-variant of OpenWRT, which would be the first coming to my mind. – Andreas Wiese May 05 '14 at 00:34
  • Obviously I wouldn't be expecting too much from this, one without a GUI would be just fine. I have heard that Linux distributions can get stripped down to around 10MiB, and didn't know if there were any current ones around of a similar size. – Snappawapa May 05 '14 at 00:39
  • Perhaps Damn Small Linux (DSL) http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/. You'll need to go w/o a GUI though given that little RAM. – slm May 05 '14 at 00:59

2 Answers2

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For Linux distros that can be installed using a floppy disk, you can see this resource. Some of the distros you can try are:

  • tomsrtbt: "The most Linux on one floppy disk." rescue/panic/emergency diskette, or shirt-pocket Linux toolkit. It's goal iscontain as much stuff as possible on 1 floppy disk, keep it self contained, build under itself, and try to make it behave like a normal system. rescue and recovery functions get priority hot
  • BG-Rescue Linux: BG-Rescue Linux is a very small Linux distribution that fits on either two floppy disks or one eltorito-boot. The system is a BusyBox 1.00 and uClibc 0.9.20 based rescue system with kernel 2.4.29.
  • blueflops: blueflops is a 2-floppy Linux distribution with a graphical web browser ("links" with SVGALIB) and a text-mode IRC client ("epic4"). The kernel version is 2.6.11.7 with almost all of the Ethernet drivers and PPP support (for dial-up connections).
  • Fd Linux: Fd Linux is a very tiny floppy distribution of Linux, set to fit on one floppy disk (kernel and root fs are combined!). All binaries are based on Red Hat. Fd Linux has been optimized, tested and is able to run on as little as a 386 with 8MB of RAM.
  • PiTux: Pitux is a floppy distro that transforms an old low-RAM machine in a very useful serial terminal running minicom. Kernel 2.4 and uClibc based it needs only 4 MB of ram.
Kusalananda
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asheeshr
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Years ago I ran muLinux (a floppy distribution) on a Toshiba 386DX laptop with 3MB RAM. I was even able to startup X-Windows, although it was so slow it was completely unusable. But commandline usage was very usable.

ruhnet
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