No DVD Drive Available

Hi I’m trying to install OpenSUSE on an older system (Dell Dimension L800R).

The problem is that this box doesn’t have a DVD drive. I tried installing through the LiveCD and it seems to run unbearably slow and it will just freeze up before I can even start the installation.

This computer was running XP, so I’d imagine this machine is entirely capable of running OpenSUSE 11.1.
**

  • Is there a set of CDs (Not LiveCDs) that I can install from instead of the DVD .iso?

  • If not, what are my alternatives?**

You may be under spec.
Tell us what you have

The live cd needs about 512mb I think. And you would really need that to run 11.1 anyway.

Doh…

That’ll do it then… that machine only has 256mb lol… I guess I’ll have to install Debian on it.

If you install using text mode rather than pretty graphics, your machine should be able to cope.

I’m typing this on an old Dell laptop with only 192MB of ram!

As I recall I installed using the Gnome CD in text mode, but once the system was up and running, installed XFCE to use in place of Gnome.

Your system will run out of steam quite quickly so you may have to be careful about what programs you try to run, but at the moment I have Firefox with 7 tabs open, some music playing using cplay and htop to see how pushed the system is - it turns out that I am using 122MB of my rather meager supply of RAM.

Neal

I just installed on a old box with a 933 Celeron and 256 MB of RAM. It is a pain to install but runs nicely for its purpose: email, word processing and surfing.

The trick is: you need a good internet connection and do a net install. This is the second old machine I was able to salvage this way in the last few weeks.