Dave's Free Press

As I watch, Linux is installing on the wee beastie. In the end, I followed this recipe to install from floppies:

• Install FreeDOS in a 50Mb partition, and create another DOS partition covering the rest of the disk.
• On another machine, make a zip file of the basics for a Debian install, plus loadlin.exe (30Mb) and use split(1) to break it into floppy-sized chunks.
• Transfer to a directory (mine was C:\DEBIAN) on the Libretto one disk at a time. It's about 24 disks.
• Combine them all back into one zip file on the D: drive using copy /b file1+file2+file3 ... D:\linux.zip
• unzip that onto the D: drive
• now that you've verified that the file was OK, clear out C:\DEBIAN and move all those files back onto C:
• run the install.bat, and install from the hard disk into the space previously taken by D:. I broke it into two partitions, one for root and one for swap.

Be careful about partitioning. Under DOS, you don't really get to see all the disk, the Libretto's BIOS hides the part of it that is used for suspend-to-disk. So, when you come to partition the disk under Linux, fill the new bit of "empty" space you find with a junk partition just to make sure you don't do anything stupid.