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Working on Gentoo on an old laptop


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Oo-wee. Gentoo, what a doozie. Of course, if there's one thing I've learned with Linux, it's that the good things are the ones that demand a lot of you. Or something... anyway.

 

I've an old Dell Latitude LM laptop (Pentium MMX 166) that can't boot off of CD. So, I've tried many options to begin my Gentoo install (for those unfamiliar: get a working network connection inside a chroot'ed environment, and you're good to go): Slackware boot floppies, Tom's Root Boot floppy, and Smart Boot Manager floppy. To make a long story short, all of them failed in one way or another.

 

Now I have a new idea/question: I think I could find some way of getting to the Gentoo LiveCD's kernel, right? Then, I could boot from that and load its filesystem as /. That'd give me ample opportunity to use the CDs commands, to get the network working (I assume), and to begin my bootstrap process.

 

Does anyone know how I could do that? Make a boot floppy that'd just do enough to get to the CD?

 

(Any other ideas?)

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Why didn't the floppy-distros work? I heard of someone using LOAF (Linux On A Floppy) to setup Gentoo - so maybe give that a shot?

 

This might also be worth checking out the Gentoo forums for an answer to...

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