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[sindi keesan <keesan AT SDF.ORG>]

On Wed, 17 Oct 2012, Indelible Bonobo wrote:

> Thank you for your reply, Sindi.
>
> I am quite sure Debian fits on the HD partition (500MB ext2 + 100MB
> swap) as I installed it on this HD using another computer.
> Unfortunately, I could not transplant the HD - perhaps the mobo reads
> the HD using a different geometry - neither Grub nor Lilo could boot
> Linux, though Lilo was able to boot DOS. The question is whether the
> RAM is sufficient and I'm quite sure that by going this route
> (building it from the ground up and not installing everything) it will
> work.

How much RAM did Debian use when installed on the hard drive in another 
computer?

> The reason why I have to keep transplating the HD is that this mobo
> cannot boot a CDROM and I'm not sure whether the floppy drive is
> defective or the floppy I tried had problems, but the floppy started
> out as good and readable and after format is unusable, so I'd rather
> not mess with floppies anymore. The Ethernet card - 3Com 3509 E III
> cannot boot from the network either.

There are a lot of old laptops around newer than your P75.  Do you live 
some place with an ecycle or freecycle group?

> The problem with trying the distros you've mentioned is first - they
> are very slow as they insist on booting a GUI which is probably
> optimized for i686 - it takes forever to do anything in it. There
> probably is a way to prevent it from loading and stay in CLI but on
> the terminal few commands seem to be working and I have difficulties
> finding information on how to run it via CLI, or how to install it
> from DOS.

A search on "puppy linux boot to cli" suggested modifying /etc/inittab to 
runlevel 3 instead of 5.  You could ask for other suggestions at the 
forum.

> I was able to boot Pulp from DOS with loadlin, but it took forever and
> I could not get networking up and running, which meant essentially I
> was stuck.

Networking works for me with all the hardware I ever fed Puppy.

> I had thought debootstrap installs /bin/bash onto the ext2 partition.
> I'll look to see if I can install gpg, the keyring, sha1sum from
> Slackware9 (couldn't find gpg on S4). The alternative would be to copy
> the Deb CD ISO contents to the HD and start it with loadlin.

BL3 uses Slackware 4 packages, but BL2 can be upgraded to use Slackware 11 
glibc and packages.

> If I can install Debian, I can then upgrade Tor via apt-get from the
> repos, without having to depend on someone else to update it for me.

Can you find some way to post without involving baslinux digest?  It adds 
a lot of redundancy to your postings.  I just signed up for delivery of 
all mails to the list.