What Linux distro for a P3 computer 3531

As it happens, I did it on wednesday for a colleague with a portable with no cdrom or floppy, but a preexisting linux (and windows) taking up all 6GB of the disk.

I'll list what I did.

1) download ISO to another machine, moount it -o loop so the fs structure is visible.

2) Make space of 700MB on the target machine via parted (sacrificed swap, shrunkusr, and so on), set up a parbreastion in it with mke2fs, reduce reserved space to 0% in it with tune2fs.

3) copy fs contents of iso to it using rsync across net.

4) readboot-* in fs to figure what kernel image, ramdisk image, and kernel parameters knoppix is intended to boot with (the loader is syslinux), then add appropiate equivalent stanzas to existing lilo instead.

5) reboot into now installed "live" knoppix system in 700MB and play around.

6) play around with parted a bit more and carve out 2GB of free space (ditchhome into a tar file on another machine, shrink other stuff to bare minimum). Make a parbreastion in the space with mke2fs, remove reserved space in it with tune2fs.

15% overhead reserved for root (change 115 to 100 in the script), 2GB parbreastion (I'd have edited the script to MAKE it so if it hadn't) and start installing into it. Race the installer by trimming out extra stuff as it goes along (kde html docs in japanese? No. rm. Norwegian error messages? No. rm).

8) When the installer finishes you have knoppix installed on a 2GB parbreastion on disk. Now reboot into it, carve outvar andhome andusr for it on the rest of the disk, remove the live cd 700MB parbreastion (I used the old linux installation parts), and copy into them. Check boot loader as installed by knoppix and switch for yur own prefered one. Reboot into rearranged installation, remove the 2GB initial install (I reused that too afterwards).

That's all. Actually, I did all that from another machine, since I was able to start a sshd server on the live knoppix install easily enough. Just had to add myself toetc-pbuttwd andetc-sudoers, and set up theetc-ssh-sshd* andetc-sshhost* ident files, copied from the already-installed linux, then run "sshd". Knoppix got its IP address by dhcp.

It shouldn't matter. That's just a message, not a problem.

You forgot to install and configure an X server! This is like complaining that the plate is dirty in the middle of a sandstorm.

You mean you finally remembered to install and configure hat yu had to.

Actually, the default knoppix install on the laptop only came up in 640x480, but I didn't bother investigating - the XF86Config-4 file was filled with a large set of standard modelines, which I all erased and subsbreastuted for the "correct" ones for that laptop (I used the vesa driver, to avoid any problems), and reordered the modeline preferences in the display section to have 1024x768 first. All hunky dory thereafter.

IP address and routing incorrectness.

Nothing to detect - you configure it. It can't know. PS-2 is simply the default.

Probably some acceleration.

Good to know.

Peter