Brain-picking for 560x

[ajhidell]

I just found this forum and it looks great. I look forward to visiting regularly. But, on to my problem.

I bought a 560x at a yard sale for $15. Specs are 233mhz, 4 gb hdd, 32 mb ram (but am planning on maxing out at 96 mb), no cd, no floppy, win 98se, no ethernet port. The problem I am having is going to be installing a linux distro. I have been checking out the live cd versions of puppy and dsl and am thinking of checking out deli as well. I have heard that these were good distros for low power, older machines.

The problem I am encountering is HOW to install. I was trying to connect to the internet using a usb network adapter, but since I have no floppy or cd, I can't load the drivers. I tried to attach a usb floppy and a usb flash drive to install the drivers, but again I couldn't configure them as I couldn't install the drivers. I was able to get the machine to recognize a 16 bit pcmcia card, but when I reboot to finish installing the software it hangs until I finally stop the process and reboot. I even thought of trying to do a direct cable connect, but that feature isn't currently installed and it prompts me to install via the win98 cd.

So what I have it a computer that I can't put anything onto. I had thought that I may get a 2.5" enclosure to put the drive in, copy the drivers and then reinstall. I was hoping to avoid this if possible.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

[phool@round]

Welcome to the Forum!

My first question is; Do you wish to keep the Windows 98 SE on it? That point was unclear.

I personally would get a cheap IBM external drive off of fleabay or our Marketplace conference. Just do a "WTB: External Floppy drive for 560X." See what pops up. With the older systems a floppy drive is a must have in many ways......as you know.

Do you have any Compact Flash cards and reader?

[ajhidell]

I do not plan on keeping Win98 on it. I am planning on upgrading the ram to the 96 mb max and loading one of the lower hardware linux distros.

I have an two external floppy drives but neither will work. One is a usb floppy and needs the drivers installed. The other is an external floppy from a 365xd and the connector is different from the one on the 560x.

Negative on the compact flash card and reader.

[phool@round]

Yeah the floppy connector the 560X is the thinner style.

I believe you still need a floppy to do a network install in most distro's.

If you have a 2.5" usb enclosure you can load the OS onto the drive using another computer. Since Linux finds it's drivers at boot time it will usually boot up any computer the disc is installed in. DSL would be the better choice there since it uses the Knoppix method for finding kernel drivers.

[ajhidell]

I was thinking that the external enclosure was probably the route that I may have to take. I didn't want to go through the hassle of pulling the HDD but I am afraid it may be necessary.

As long as I can get one distro loaded (DSL probably) and get the usb floppy I have recognized, I can then at least have the option of experimenting with various distros. One key will be in which distro I can configure my wireless adapter. I have heard that DSL is good about auto configuring quite a few cards/adapters from the get-go. At the least I could try to use ndiswrapper as well.

[phool@round]

Sounds like a plan. Here's a link to download the 560X Hardware Maintenance Manual; 560X.

Good luck, post your results.

[ajhidell]

Thanks for the help and the suggestions. I will post how this all turns out. I am anxious to see what I can squeeze out of this old machine.

[whizkid]

My 560E boots from a PCMCIA SD card reader. For instance, I can download a boot.iso (around 10MB or so), then use dd to copy it to the SD card in another laptop. Pop that into the 560E, change the boot order and away it goes. Couldn't be easier.

It does NOT work in my 600X, but the 560X may still have a BIOS that works that way. Just another option. Also see this page:

http://thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installation_ ... -ROM_drive

[ajhidell]

Well I finally got DSL installed on my old 560X. I couldn't find a suitable way to install without a floppy or cd drive, so I installed the HDD in a old 365XD and booted the DSL LiveCD and did a HDD install. I then put the HDD back in the 560X. DSL configured all the hardware perfectly and even correctly configured the Netgear MA401 wireless card right out of the box. I maxed out the RAM at 96 MB and now this 10 year old machine runs at an amazing speed give the age of the hardware. It runs comparable to laptops I had running XP with much higher processor speeds and much more RAM. I am completely satisfied. I am looking to upgrade the HDD to a bit larger size if I can find one on the cheap.

So, for $25 bucks ($15 for computer, $10 for RAM upgrade) I have transformed a basically useless old machine into a quite capable and quick laptop suitable for web surfing (Firefox, Dillo), emailing (Sylpheed), and playing audio (Xmms, VLC) and video (VLC). It even has enough juice to edit audio files using Audacity.
It is low enough on resources that the machine can run on battery for about 1.5 hours, whereas before I was only getting about 50 minutes when it had Win 98 installed.

Next I am looking to do something with this old 365XD that I have. I don't think it has enough RAM to run X in linux, but maybe I could use it to learn a bit more about CLI.

Any suggestions on what to try/use would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again for the help.

[phool@round]

You can turn that DSL into a full on Deb box now that it's up and running. Just point it to the Deb repositories. DSL is excellent for a lightweight linux but there is a learning curve to small foot print linux. It's almost like learning a new OS. If you want to take full advantage of Linux then it's better to have a compiler on board...... that way you can download binaries/source files and compile them in yourself if the Deb repositories don't have the package you want. Finding a precompiled package for DSL is rather scarce outside of the DSL repository.

Just my opinion.

CLI is simply Command Line Interface.... cp?