Hi everybody,
I got a relict in pretty good conditions and I'd like to give it a second life.
It is IBM ThinkPad 560E with P166, 80Mb ram, 2Gb hdd, Trident video.
From some posts here it sounds like it's possible to run AntiX on it but I have a bunch of problems.
First of all it has old bios (v.1.04, latest 1.13) and I cannot find means to update it since my battery is long dead.
Second it doesn't have any removable media: no cdrom, no usb, no floppy. So I can only pull the hdd and copy files from desktop.
It has working PCMCIA slot and I have a network adapter in it which has drivers for Win98 and W2K so I have network connection.
I managed to install win98 and it runs pretty fast, even web browsing is available with K-Meleon.
I have now w2k on it but it runs with some problems (needs bios update) most noticable is tremendous fragmentation (needs defrag daily).

So I'd like to try install a Linux distro in hope that it will overcome Windows in features and performance.
But how can I install Linux having none removable media?

First I tried unetbootin. It installs, gives dual boot but then stops with error: cannot find menu.lst though the file is in the unetbootin folder (I also tried to copy it to root but result is the same: not found). The result is the same for win98 and w2k as well as for older or newer versions of unetbootin.
Then I tried grub4dos and DSL. It perfectly gives dual boot and even boot DSL's kernel but then again"not found" this time Knoppix is not found despite the folder is right here.
I tried to install Puppy to this hdd only to get grub on mbr and then tried to reinstall on the laptop and ... not found again...
Shortly: How to install AntiX on this laptop?
Many thanks in advance.

it sounds like you may have tried something similar to this,but i have an older laptop with a similar setup.

To install antix on it i removed the hard drive, put it in a usb enclosure and plugged it in another computer. on that computer i preformated the drive for a full install, however at the end of the drive i left a small partition. in this partition i added the antix iso. i then installed grub to the mbr of the hard drive and pointed it to boot the iso. after that was finished i put the drive back in the laptop and booted it off of the iso and ran the installer which i pointed to use the partitions i had made beforehand. once the installer had finished it rebooted and i was in the installed version.

hope this helps
Dave

Sounds great!
Have you extracted the iso to that partition and then pointed grub to the kernel and initrd?
Or maybe you used LiveCD iso?
What grub and how have you installed it to mbr?
How your kernel line in menu.lst looked like?
Could you also tell what machine your have installed to and what version of AntiX?
My apologies for so many questions, thank you very much.

later today i can take a look at the laptop so i know 100% what i did, i could probably get 85 % from memory but it would be missing some key parts i am sure.

Today, the notebook can still use wonderful as MP3 players for the stereo system or as an e-book reader (PDF). Internet forums are also 2.0 and the Pentium processors of the 1st Generation, however, clearly too weak.

According Thinkwiki.org the Thinkpad 560E boot from a CF card in a PCMCIA card reader when the CF card as HDD bootable with the method described there makes and in the BIOS boot order changes so that PCMCIA stands in front of the HDD.

========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://thinkwiki.de/560#Erfahrungsberichte"
linktext was:"http://thinkwiki.de/560#Erfahrungsberichte"
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Thanks Dave, your experience may help me a lot.

You right Male: it's really old laptop but it still can be used as a business notebook: it runs OS and office suite, it has internet access and... it's just very light to be taken to anywhere.
I just dream to replace Windows.
On local scrap yards I couldn't find yet even hdd 4-5Gb that's recognizable by current bios. PCMCIA is the only gate on this machine and I'm hunting any pcmcia based hardware included card reader. No luck so far.

zeiz - you will be very unlikely to run a modern OS with an office suite on it.

I am sorry but the contents of the live partition I set up to install on the harddrive are removed so I cannot show examples, I will need to go by memory.

Have you extracted the iso to that partition and then pointed grub to the kernel and initrd?
Or maybe you used LiveCD iso?
However it sat on a live usb I had made, that is how the contents of my live partition where. I used antix2usb to make the lave usb
What grub and how have you installed it to mbr?
grub-legacy, the default for antix. Refer to the below steps for how I installed
How your kernel line in menu.lst looked like?
I do not have the contents of the partition anymore so I cannot copy it here, but it was the same as the live usb except the hd(0,0) parts where changed to point to my live partition. I think this would have been hd(0,3). I also changed the root= line to point to my live partition, root=/dev/sda4 I believe.
Could you also tell what machine your have installed to and what version of AntiX?
The laptop I have is a hp pavilion ze1000 that came with xp home edition. After the service pack updates it would no longer run a a decent speed. It does have usb ports and a cdrom, however the cdrom is no longer functioning and the usb ports are far to slow to run / install through. I had installed antix version 11 on it, with antix version 12 the way the live usb is setup will be different than how I did it with version 11. I think copying the contents of the live usb will still be fine but the live partition on the hard drive will need to be labeled antiX as it uses labels to find the partition to boot, not the root= line.

what I did to install (again from memory)
-remove drive from hp, put in enclosure and connect to my latop
-ran gparted as root and partitioned my drive
swap(2gb) | root(10gb) | home(25gb) | live(1.2gb)
-after it finished I closed gparted and ran
install-grub /dev/sdb
-once that finished I mounted the live partition
mount /dev/sdb4 /mnt/sdb4
-Took a premade live usb stick (made using antix2usb), mounted it, and copied the contents of the / partition to the live partition of the drive
cp /mnt/sdc1/* /mnt/sdb4/ -R
-Took the menu.lst from the live usb and copied it to the harddrive.
-Opened the copied menu.lst and modified the (hd0,0) settings to point to the live partition on the harddrive.
-Unmounted all the removable media
-Removed the drive from the enclosure and put it back in the hp
-started the hp and ran as if it was a live usb, once in fluxbox I ran the installer ( you will probably need to boot into init 3 and run the cli installer.)
-made sure custom installation was checked, choose my root and home partitions (sda2, sda3) and let it go through the installation.
yes to format root, yes to format home, yes to format swap, yes to install grub to mbr
-rebooted into my fresh install and enjoyed (evidently formated the live partition).

If you get it installed it is probably worth trying to setup zram on the computer as you have such a small amount of ram.

I wish I could give more detailed instructions, but I no longer have history of the procedure and I simply cannot remember everything I did for installing this as it is over a year ago. Hope it helps you find a rough path.
Dave

Greetings, Admin.
You're right and I was not about MODERN OS. With only 80Mb of ram as maximum neither latest FF nor Open/Libre Office will run. However it runs win98 with office97 perfectly and it even runs w2k with office2k! The only problem with 2K suite is fragmentation: I need to update bios (get somewhere new battery or create its emulation). Currently I employ K-Meleon as web browser 'cause FF, Opera and IE>6 doesn't run on this machine.
It's now hard to believe but with win98+office97 I used to run international business using Word, Excel and I created multicurrency accounting application with Access97 which served me much better than any commercial one available at that time. I had IBM TP380 and then TP i1452 that was much better than 560E but still a lot below Dave's HP ze1000.
So I don't have much problems with Windows but I'm in general on Linux since 2008 so ... here I am.
And finally it's all of course about just a working toy: I simply cannot dump such a qt to recycle... __{{emoticon}}__

Many thanks, Dave!
In general I understood your install and I'm making Live usb on another machine now.
I currently confused a bit with your grub installation: grub requires also files on it's own partition (usually /boot/grub) but you installed to just /dev/sdb on another machine so I expect the files where on that machine and not on your ze1000. Though I never tried such install and I'd like to try right now, then I'll return with my results. Thanks again for your great guide.
BTW I managed to launch Puppy 2.14 (frugal) from within current win2k ntfs partition (only 380Mb of free space). It runs very well but I couldn't get to Internet yet: all puppy's drivers for Xircom pcmcia network adapter failed. Anyway it gives me a hope __{{emoticon}}__

Puppy 2.14 was released on 18-02- 2007 and is considered well out of date. If it runs well enough for you then I would chose it over the latest antiX (5 1/2 years on from Puppy 2.14) as antiX-12 will not be anywhere near as fast or light on such old hardware.
I'm only saying this, not to discourage you from installing antiX (and the hoops needed on that box), but to let you know that even if you succeed, running antiX-12 will be pretty painful unless you use that box only with cli apps and in that case install antiX-core and add what you want/need/the box can deal with.

anticapitalista wrote:Puppy 2.14 was released on 18-02- 2007 and is considered well out of date. If it runs well enough for you then I would chose it over the latest antiX (5 1/2 years on from Puppy 2.14) as antiX-12 will not be anywhere near as fast or light on such old hardware.
I'm only saying this, not to discourage you from installing antiX (and the hoops needed on that box), but to let you know that even if you succeed, running antiX-12 will be pretty painful unless you use that box only with cli apps and in that case install antiX-core and add what you want/need/the box can deal with.

That is really good (and kind of you), anti, to point out what would work well on such an aging piece of hardware. It has been a LONG time since I ran hardware with hardware that old or limited (I had a 166 MHz system between ten and twelve years ago), but up until about three years ago, I ran a 1 GHz Dell Dimension 4100. It ran just about anything in its day and was outstanding for compatibility with a wide range of systems, from Windows XP to Debian, and of course, to Puppy, antiX, and SimplyMEPIS.

About seven or eight years ago, I still had a 400 MHz laptop made by CyberMAX. It was a great laptop years ago, and it also worked with a lot of different software, but at the end of its useful lifetime, I found that it only ran well with a few things.

Puppy 2.14 was one of the best small systems in its day, and it would run well on either the CyberMAX or the old Dell (can't remember if I ever ran it on a really old Toshiba 166 MHz laptop I had a decade ago, but if anything would work with it, I'd nominate Puppy, too, and I found those versions in the Puppy 2 series, particular 14 (and 17 as well, if I remember right) worked extremely well.

So I applaud this recommendation; I think that in this case, it would be one of the best choices for that generation of hardware.
(That said, for anything within the past 5-7 years, antiX works GREAT, even antiX 12. I have antiX 12 working really well on an old Dell Dimension 3000 desktop AND an old Dell Latitude D610. Both were current in the 2003-2005 time frame, and both still work very well, whereas Windows XP, in contrast, runs like a slug on the same systems, and so I replaced BOTH with antiX 12).

So far Puppy keeps me"wireless" and if I won't fix the driver it's useless: I can accept full cli computing but without network it would be too boring nowadays. BTW 2.14 was recently updated (!) it's still maintained.
Just few hours ago I ran AntiX-12 on Dell Latitude D800 (2004): it runs excellent, I even forgot that I'm in LiveCD mode. This machine is just great (also was dumped to me with dead screen), I can run win7 and any Linux on it except latest versions and those with latest KDE4. Its video card has ridiculous 32Mb of ram! I'm dumping now GeForce3 Ti200 (about 12 y.o or more) and it has 128Mb. Similar NV card is also available for D800 but it would be costly...Currently I run Ubuntu 10.04.4 on it +XP full update with office 2010.

My try with Dave's technique failed. The live USB size is 1.1Gb and I have only 2Gb HDD. I need to find another solution. Any ideas?

try making a usb of base or core versions, they would require a bit of building your own os. The usb size would be smaller, and it may be of benefit to be able to install your own apps without trying to clean the others.

as anti says
install antiX-core and add what you want/need/the box can deal with.

you can also use the live partition as your home partition after install. if you partition your drive 1gb and 1 gb you could install everything in the first, remove the live contents from the second, add your home contents to the second and edit fstab to mount the second partition to /home. that way you are not loosing drive space

edit: it is also a possibility to continue running the computer as if it were on live usb and then setup your root and home persistance to save changes then you can format the drive for one partition and copy the full usb to it.

do not forget your swap space, you will need to with 80mb ram

Thank you very much, Dave.
I just backed up my 1.2Gb w2k installation with partimage and then I'll make 3 partitions: 128Mb swap, 1.5 Gb main and the rest for installation files. I think base version (330Mb) is right for my hdd and I red it's fully functional. I can add some software later. Let's see if it will work for me. __{{emoticon}}__