Install On A Dell Inspiron 3000 P200

Forum: Laptops
Topic: Install On A Dell Inspiron 3000 P200
started by: s1mp13m4n

Posted by s1mp13m4n on Dec. 04 2007,00:43

Hello everyone. I have an old Dell Inspiron 3000 laptop with a P200 CPU in it and a 3GB hard drive. It has only a floppy drive in it, no cdrom, networking, or modem unless you add it in the pcmcia slot. It has Win95 on it now. How can I install DSL on this laptop? What are my options here? My goal is to use the laptop as another way to surf the web, web design, blogging, etc. I would like to go wireless with the laptop if DSL supports this by using either my Linksys wireless N card or my older Dell Truemobile 1150 B card. How do I get started and what are my first steps? I have a 4GB usb flash drive if that old laptop will allow me to use it. Here is a link to the laptops specs and thank you for the help.

< http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/ptwist/specs.htm >

Posted by john.martzouco on Dec. 04 2007,02:15

Hi s1,

In your situation, one possibility is to find an adapter that will allow you to hook up the laptop's hard drive to the IDE cable in a desktop machine. I've heard it mentioned as a 2-1/2 inch to 3-1/2 inch adapter. Once you've got that in hand, you can install the DSL files to the laptop harddrive and install GRUB on that little harddrive so it can fire up the next time you put it back in the laptop.

Your best choice for a wireless PCMCIA card is the Airlink Super G (AR5212). This is the card that is being used by DSL's maintainer (RobertS) and it is easy to configure for both WEP and WPA.

I imagine that your old laptop is limited in RAM and I would suggest that you perform a traditional HD install because of this.

Until you get your hardware figured out, you might want to run DSL under virtualization to get used to it.

Regards,
John

Posted by curaga on Dec. 04 2007,17:10

You actually have surprisingly many possibilities

- DSL can do a floppy-only install. This takes a lot of time though, swinging a floppy about 40 times back and forth
- Pcmcia network card is a good option
- Win95 supports both serial and paraller laplink; It's a good way too, and cheap (I got a 5m serial laplink cable for 5e)
- from the docs I see it also has infrared. So you could do a wireless install, if you can use an other laptop

Usb would work otherwise, but Win95 doesn't support usb (only OSR2 does, but too limited; only usb keyboards and mice). You could boot a recent one-floppy linux distro with usb support though ;)

Posted by john.martzouco on Dec. 04 2007,17:20

Quote (curaga @ Dec. 04 2007,12:10)

- Win95 supports both serial and paraller laplink; It's a good way too, and cheap (I got a 5m serial laplink cable for 5e)

Nice. If you're handy with a soldering iron and can get two male 25-pin connectors, this isn't very difficult to build. Let me know and I'll link a page that describes the pin-pin connections.

Posted by curaga on Dec. 04 2007,17:25

The pin-to-pin connections are described with the linux kernel

Edit: the serial laplink cable is just straight-through, when the paraller one isn't. That's why it's easy to find a readymade suitable serial one, but not a paraller one :P