Boot Knoppix from DOS

[lothario]

(Sorry if this sounds sacrilegious.)

I have an older PC with 2Gb hard disk.
About 850MB free on the hard disk.
No CDROM. 192MB RAM.

It runs DOS (FAT) because it has some old
DOS games that I am not allowed to delete.

I can copy over the knoppix ISO file to the C drive.

Big question - can I start Knoppix while I am in DOS?

It is ok if I have to shutdown and restart the PC to get back into DOS.

[Harry Kuhman]

Can you: Maybe.
Should you: Maybe not.

You give the RAM available, which sounds health enough for minimal Linux. You don't give the CPU type which would help others advise if it is a wise thing to try or not, but with that much memory I'm guessing that the CPU may be up to it.

With 850 megs available you will only be able to do a "poor man's install" of Knoppix; that will result in a system that you can't install anything else to. It pretty much would have to stay exactly as it is on the ISO. How well it runs the KDE GUI with that much memory, well, it will be close.

Is a floppy disk available to assist in booting?

How do you plan to get Knoppix on this system? You already told us you have no CD. Do you have Internet access on a DOS only system?

If you have a way to get Knoppix on it you may want to consider installing a real hard disk install of Debian instead. 850 megs would actually be pretty comfortable for a small Debian install, particularly if you used a less resource hungry GUI like Gnome rather than KDE which Knoppix uses. That would give you a system that you can actually install the programs that you want on, do some reasonable Linux work, and apt-get additional software packages if you have internet access.


I'm also guessing that the remaining available space is in an existing FAT partition. If you do decide to go the Debian route you will need some way to shring the existing FAT partition so all or most of the free 850 megs can be available for Linux partition types.

[lothario]

The CPU is an AMD K6.

I want to use this PC for mainly text chat and email.
That is GAIM and Konqurer.
Don't need to do much linux work.
Don't want to install anything else on this PC.

Being Knoppix, it is nice to know there is a lot more there if I need it.

It has an old 3Com 3c509 ISA nic.
Yes, there is a floppy drive.

I could copy the ISO on the spare disk space with
the trusty tomsrtbt or the old LapLink.

I may have some space left over for a 100Mb (FAT)
swap file, I think?

I would prefer to not do any more partitioning of the hard disk
since there is enough space there for the current Knoppix ISO.