- TINY success stories -
- Installed on an old Laptop

posted on Thu Mar 1 18:16:43 2001 by LRL

I have an old Sharp PC3020 (cyrix 486 processor) laptop that was given to me. It was running windows 95 very slow (3020's originally shipped with 3.11) so I decided to give Tiny Linux a try and got it installed via floppies (no cdrom) with little to no problem. I first tried a few other stripped down installs but Tiny was by far the easiest for my low memory/hard drive space (700MB) system. Things to watch out for: During the Slackware set up (on the root disk) be careful to select only the 'base linux intall' and deselect all the other packages such as games ect., or else you will be prompted to insert more disk sets (after the 'a' set), that you probably don't have handy. Also, the first time I tried to auto install LILO during the setup process it failed, so I booted up with a dos floppy and fdisked the master boot record (fdisk /MBR) and the second time through LILO had no trouble writing itself to that space. I used the kernal from the setup and that was it. One, more thing, I found out linux doesn't support hot-swapping or at least I don't know how to make it work, so if you take a PCMCIA card out while the machine is running don't expect it to work when you put it back in without restarting. Just some suggestion, hope they help out. I have only been playing with it for a day or so, but so far I have networking up and running (it recognized and initialized the 3com card I have with out any manual config.!), next I am going to play around with a xwindow manager and VNC, since it gets a little annoying looking at the 8" display for more than a few minutes. I will probably use the machine as a gateway/router for my home network or a simple webserver, all in all it will be a hell of a lot more useful that if it were still running windows!


- Expensive laptop fix or a free redemption!!!

posted on Fri Mar 9 18:18:56 2001 by Christopher Youngblood

Hello; I just have to say, that if "Tiny Linux" did not exist I do not know what I would have done. I have an IBM Thinkpad 365X Laptop and it was running Winblows 95+, well after using the built in Backup utility Winblows erased itself from my hard drive. With only a floppy drive as my only bootable removable media, I found Microshaft to be no help with any of this. On my desktop I use Winblows 98SE and Linux-Mandrake, unfortunatly, Mandrake requires 32 MB RAM, I only had 16 MB on the laptop. So after researching on the internet a few Linux guru's pointed me to Tiny. Well installation was not the easiest I have ever done, but it went off with minor troubles. Now my laptop is up and running faster then it did under 95+. Thank you Tiny Linux. New fan and supporter; Christopher Youngblood