Tek Guy
03-22-2005, 12:22 AM
Howdy folks.
Let me just give you a small intro: Linux and I dont get along. We never have and judging from my recent experiences we never will. That aside, I haven't given up trying. This time around, a friend is in dire need of her own PC. All she needs to do is browse the net (via Windows connection sharing) , do email and maybe a little open office. All I can give her right now is a P100 complete with 80 megs of Ram and 3 Gigs (via 2(!) HDDs :D). Being that Linux is infintely more powerful and -whats even more important - safe than Windows for this configuration, I went and tried several distros. SUSE did not want to cooperate at all. Also, it was much too large. So I started to look around for compact distros. One Distro I was almost happy with was Damn Small Linux. It was only 50 Megs in size, did browsing and emailing and installed in a jiffy. However I don't have a clue how to a) change the system language to german - keep in mind it is only 50 megs big, and thus only comes in english. Also it b) lacked a proper browser, Dillo does not even handle frames. Instead of trying to fiddle around with a system I hardly know anything about, I looked around for a system that already comes with the proper configuration. You all know where I went next.
After some trouble with knoppix not accepting existng linux swap partitions during boot (only FAT), i finally made my way to a decent X Windows System. Being that it still runs off a CD, performance is sluggish to say the least. I sincerely hope I can get decent performance out of the system, even it it means changing the shell to something less fancy (suggestions appreciated)
But essential for this is getting it on HDD. knoppix-installer does not work in text mode. So i followed the suggestion and went X. However, the script seems to be really buggy. I even downloaded and ran the newest veriosn i can find, but still after system selection a help file about xdialog pos up, the setup is exited.
So unless somebody can suggest a working script, I would really appreciate any pointers toward a manual installation howto or similar help. thanks.
Let me just give you a small intro: Linux and I dont get along. We never have and judging from my recent experiences we never will. That aside, I haven't given up trying. This time around, a friend is in dire need of her own PC. All she needs to do is browse the net (via Windows connection sharing) , do email and maybe a little open office. All I can give her right now is a P100 complete with 80 megs of Ram and 3 Gigs (via 2(!) HDDs :D). Being that Linux is infintely more powerful and -whats even more important - safe than Windows for this configuration, I went and tried several distros. SUSE did not want to cooperate at all. Also, it was much too large. So I started to look around for compact distros. One Distro I was almost happy with was Damn Small Linux. It was only 50 Megs in size, did browsing and emailing and installed in a jiffy. However I don't have a clue how to a) change the system language to german - keep in mind it is only 50 megs big, and thus only comes in english. Also it b) lacked a proper browser, Dillo does not even handle frames. Instead of trying to fiddle around with a system I hardly know anything about, I looked around for a system that already comes with the proper configuration. You all know where I went next.
After some trouble with knoppix not accepting existng linux swap partitions during boot (only FAT), i finally made my way to a decent X Windows System. Being that it still runs off a CD, performance is sluggish to say the least. I sincerely hope I can get decent performance out of the system, even it it means changing the shell to something less fancy (suggestions appreciated)
But essential for this is getting it on HDD. knoppix-installer does not work in text mode. So i followed the suggestion and went X. However, the script seems to be really buggy. I even downloaded and ran the newest veriosn i can find, but still after system selection a help file about xdialog pos up, the setup is exited.
So unless somebody can suggest a working script, I would really appreciate any pointers toward a manual installation howto or similar help. thanks.