How can I make the 15MB Tiny Core boot floppies?

[computergeek92]

I was happy to find out that Iron browser can run on a 90MHz Pentium CPU and 16MB of ram, so I needed an OS to pair it with and Tiny Core seems to be the lightest as well as currently updated. (Unlike DSL) The PC is a Toshiba Tecra 720CDT (Pentium 133MHz cpu, 144MB ram, 2GB hdd) that is too old to boot from a CD, has no USB ports, but does have an external floppy drive and a PCMCIA LAN card. How do I go about making the boot floppies and installing Tiny Core to the 2GB hard drive? Also, is my theory correct that if you use very old slow computers on the internet will there be little chance of viruses and malware since the system will be way below the malicious program's system requirements?

[core-user]

Likely you would need 'Plop' (an independant boot manager) on a floppy disk, which will then let you boot up from your cdrom drive, from which you should be able to install to your internal drive.

[curaga]

You can also remove the HD, and install to it via another machine.

[Misalf]

Plop boot manager is very nice for doing it the easy way (and I always have it around) but it doesn't work for all BIOSes because some don't respect certain standards. At least that's the case for USB booting. Might be different for CDROMs.

It might avoid some trouble though, if formating the drive, installing a boot loader and copying tinycore files, is done while the drive is plugged into another computer as curaga suggests.

Files to copy:

Code: [Select]

.
|---+/boot/
|   `---+/extlinux/    (<--  Or whaterver boot loader.)
|       |-- extlinux.conf
|       `-- *
`---+/tce/    (<--  That's "cde" on CDROM.)
    |-- onboot.lst
    |---+/boot/
    |   |-- vmlinuz
    |   `-- core.gz
    |---+/ondemand/    (<--  Will be created by tinycore.)
    |   |-- *
    |   `-- *.img
    `---+/optional/
        `-- *.tcz

Sample boot entry:

Code: [Select]

LABEL core
MENU LABEL TinyCore 5.4
KERNEL /tce/boot/vmlinuz
APPEND root=/dev/sda1 initrd=/tce/boot/core.gz  quiet loglevel=4  logo.nologo  tce=/tce  showapps  blacklist=bluetooth,btusb  vga=789  desktop=fluxbox 


[computergeek92]

I don't understand those dos codes provided or how to use them, but I put PLOP on a floppy and it allowed me to boot to my tinycore cd then to the desktop. The screen res is set to 1024 by 768 but my screen is only capable of max 800 by 600. I look on google and a site says to press ctrl alt backspace, type xsetup, make choices, then type startx. I first pressed ctrl alt backspace, then the screen went black and nothing else happened. I then rebooted the machine and tried the terminal program and typed xsetup and then it started to work. I chose 800x600x16, then ps/2 2 button, then when I typed startx I got wbar: no process killed - four times in a row. I don't know what to do. Linux seems much less user friendly than Windows.

[Misalf]

No idea why it won't start X after changing resolution.
Maybe try the  xvesa  boot code. In the CD's boot menu, instead of pressing ENTER, press TAB to edit the currently highlighted boot entry and add  xvesa=800x600x32 .

[curaga]

According to Toshiba specs, Tecra 720cdt has a 1024x768 screen with a Chips gpu. The 710cdt is the same but with a 800x600 screen, so perhaps yours is a 710.

These old GPUs are occasionally not fully VESA compatible, and Xfbdev tends to work better. See the FAQ and wiki.

[computergeek92]

Oh my mistake, I meant to say I own a 710CDT not a 720CDT. My 710CDT goes as far a 800 x 600 when I was running Windows 98 on it previously. I'll go try the boot fix method now.