I want to install OpenSUSE on an older Dell laptop with window 98 on it. I want to remove '98 and use only Linux, no dual booting. However, the machine will not boot from cd, therefore I need a boot floppy to get started after I format the drive and remove Windows. Any help for this?
Go to the directory /boot/i386 (or x86_64) of your CD/DVD and read README.DOS. There you will find the explanation.
If you do not have any Linux-machine, you may use cygwin under Windows (Cygwin Information and Installation)
What are the specs of this machine (CPU speed, memory, disk space)? Memory is the most important. If less than about 192-256MB you’ll find it hard to have a good experience with KDE.
may be i didn’t understand you, but see:
you have grub booter (or lilo it’s not very important, in other case you culdn’t boot windows)
so just boot into SUSE. install there gparted (or qparted) depends on DE. umount win drive and format it as you want and just edit grub(lilo).conf
for what you want use floppy drive?o.O
Thanks, I’m looking at the options given so far trying to figure out which one to go with. Will post back later with results.
For what it is worth i think it is correct you did not understand him. He has no Grub/LILO, he has no SUSE, He only has the SUSE CD/DVD on a system that is not capable of booting from it (those systems may be a bit old, but so what).
The advice from LJHKmp to download the Linux version from Smart Boot Manager, to execute it so it writes a boot floppy is correct. You boot from the floppy and it offers you to go on with the CD/DVD. I did it yesterday!
There’s another way that doesn’t involve booting off a floppy, but getting W98 to boot grub4dos. It’s explained here in the context of installing Puppy Linux on a W98 machine but the same principle applies, instead of booting Puppy, you get grub4dos in your case to boot the installer vmlinuz kernel and initrd copied off the boot CD, and then you do a normal install. It wasn’t clear if you don’t have a CD, or you can’t boot off the CD (strange that you can’t boot off the CD if you have a CD, but then I haven’t seen all the strange laptops). Anyway if you can read the CD, you can install off it, if not you can do a network install.
if that machine won’t run XP quite snappily i’d guess you will be VERY
unhappy at how it runs SuSE 11.0…(but, it will probably run SuSE 7.x
or so, ok…maybe)
i don’t know what you intend to do with that machine but if it is to
“try out” SuSE let me save you some trouble: you won’t like it on that
machine anymore than you would like Vista on that machine…
depending on what you need, you might wanna try one of the smaller,
lighter, less hardware strength needing distros…like Damn Small Linux
<http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/> or Puppy Linux
<http://www.puppylinux.org/> both should run on “antique” Win98
ventage hardware…and, might be as quick and nimble (or more) as was
the original Win98 was before it fragged up the drive…
good luck…
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DenverD (Linux Counter 282315)
A Texan in Denmark