I have a book, and a computer, a 386 with nothing better to do than to run
Win 3.1. I would like to scrooch the hard drive and convert it into a Unix
box, thus eliminating the need for MicroSquish on that box.

   What I need is to know what can be run in place of DOS, and how can I
get a copy of whatever that may be for free or less than the national debt
of Peru. I already investied in a copy of Unix for Dummies, and I also have
my experience on Grex to fall back on.

   The one drawback to all this is that there is no CD-Rom drive in the 386.
However, I do have one in my 486 box and I could possibly make a floppy from
the CD drive on my 486.

 Advice? Comments? Questions? Warnings?

Thanks in advance.

19 responses total.

Can you temporarily put the CD-ROM in the 386?  That'd be the easiest way to
get things installed.  Otherwise, your best bet may be to do an NFS install. 
Most Linuxes support this.  You'd need to run an NFS server on the 486. 
There's a free one for Windows 95 available at
http://www.truegrid.com/nfs.html, but I've never tried it.

Or, put the 386's hard drive in the 486, do the install, then put it back in
the 386.  (I've done lots of tricks like this, since I've had machines with
no floppy drive on occasion.)

  Gee, that is an awful lot of work. I was hoping that there would be a Unix
like BSD or System V on floppies.

I don't know about other distros but slackware can still be installed 
from floppies.  The slackware website is at http://www.slackware.com  
Even if you obtain it on CD you can still create the needed floppies on 
your 486.

Another trick that I've used for situations like this to use the old dos 
version of LapLink5 to copy transfer over the needed installation files. 
 This, of course, would require that you keep a small DOS partition on 
your 386, rather dedicating the whole drive to Linux.

I have a copy of slackware 3.2 or 3.3 on CD that I've no use for if you 
want it.

You're welcome to download any of NetBSD, OpenBSD, or FreeBSD and put
it on floppies.  I did it for FreeBSD 3.2 so that I could install it
on machines without a CD-ROM.  If you promise to bring my disks back
promptly, I'll loan you my set.  But you'd probably feel better in
having your own set.

  Can you make me a set if I give you the floppies? I have a few that had 
Win 3.1 on them that I'm never going to need again. I already have one copy
of Win 3.1 on 2 sets of floppies, so giving one up is not an issue.

  send me some mail. I think this is what I'd like to do.

Floppies are really cheap.  Time generally isn't.  I imagine most people would
be far more willing to supply you with the appropriate number of floppies than
to spend hours putting disks in and out of floppy drives for you.

I'm not saying nobody will offer to do that for you, but you should understand
what you're asking, and that providing the blank flopies is likely irrellevant
to the whole situation.

Right.  Even though I scripted the formatting of the disks and the
copying of the files, it still took quite a few hours of sitting here
plugging disks in the drive and monitoring that I didn't have any bad
floppies (I had two, out of new boxes of disks).  I don't know for sure
how many total disks it was but I'm guessing well over 50 and that's not
the entire distribution (but does include the mandatory bin files, plus
kernel source, games, dict, all docs/man pages, and XFree86).  I'm not
really sure I want to go through all that again (and working with used
diskettes would not be a good thing, especially Microsoft disks).

IMHO, the best suggestion offered so far is to borrow the CD drive from 
the 486.  If you've got a modem in the 386, or one you can plug into it, 
you can do a net install of FreeBSD.  It'll take ages, and you'll need 
two new floppies to use as boot floppies.  (You can either download the 
boot floppy images or grab them off someone's CD.)

Another suggestion: see if there's a local Linux or Free Unix Users' 
Group that has installathons.

Good luck!

   Maybe this isn't for me after all.

The CD install of any of the systems mentioned here isn't all that bad.
Really, if you've got half a shot at getting a CD drive running, even if
only for a day or two, that'd probably be the best way to go.

Re #9: It's really no different from installing any modern OS.  Win95 is 30
floppies if you do it the hard way.

For some systems without CD-ROM drives, I have installed Linux by creative
use of a ZIP drive, this gets around the issue of needing a DOS partition
on the drive.  Its' weird, but it has worked so far.

  I think it might be easier to hook the 386 up to the net and download it.

If you've got access to another machine with a fast net connection and
the hard drive space, downloading the system isn't too bad (but then
you have to deal with putting it on some medium you can use on your
386...floppies, ZIP, etc.).  Maybe you can borrow a fast modem for a
couple days?  Dunno, but if you can get a CD working...that'd be the
easiest.

It's possible to install some distributions directly over the network, too,
but most of them only support it via ethernet, not PPP.  (Since I usually
have a direct campus network connection, this is often my method of choice. 
Slow, but you can start it up and then leave it to its own devices.)

From www.freebsd.org:
  FreeBSD can be installed from a variety of media including CD-ROM, 
  floppy disk, magnetic tape, an MS-DOS partition, or if you have a 
  network connection, you can install it directly over anonymous FTP
  or NFS. All you need is pair of blank, 1.44MB floppies and these 
  directions.
(The directions are at http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/install.html)

As was mentioned, using the CD-ROM is the easiest & fastest method.
You can also use FTP, a pile o' floppies, a ZIP or tape drive, a DOS 
partition, or via UFS or NFS.  


I'd be glad to help with an install of FreeBSD (I'd probably be pretty 
useless with a Linux install, but could try) if you could arrange to get 
you and your box to Kalamazoo sometime when I'll be there...  I do have 
a test box that we could use, either to swipe a CD-ROM from or to put 
your hard drive into for the install.

Just curious... Did you ever get anything installed?  I downloaded 
FreeBSD a few days ago and it reminded me of this item.

 Not yet, and there is a good reason for that. I've started on a few other
projects like learning more advanced techniques in HTML; Getting my Mac HD
on line once again, cleaning off the downstairs desk; installing Win 95 on
my PS/2, finding a free Internet PPP connection (netzero) and getting my Mac
and the harddrive back on speaking terms again. I think once I have the access
I can download Freebsd from the net. One of these days I will get sick of Win
95 and use that CD to install Unix on this box....

I just installed FreeBSD on an extra box that I had, but I haven't got X up and
running yet.

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