operating systems

[surf_angel]

I am running into several problems I have obtained several 386 & 486 machines that I would like to put windows 95 or linux on some already have 3.1 on them , I have formted the disk but because I only have floppy drives in these machines and really don't want to put cd drives in at this time ( I am trying to set these up for my children), I am not sure how to get windows on floppy or where to get linux if it will work. What do I need to do to set these systems up for my kids
? Thanks for any help.

[K A Hall]

Loading windows from a floppy is possible, but it is a pain. 21 or so disks I believe. I would just install the cd-rom temporarily and remove it after the install.

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Extra Screw? What Extra Screw?

[WJWheels]

Using a Direct Cable Connection, you could copy the cab files to the hdd's of the old computers and then install.

[WJWheels]

quote:

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Originally posted by glc:
You would need 95 already installed to use direct cable connection.

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Yup.. my bad on that one. If they have 3.1 on them, laplink should work though.

[surf_angel]

hey, could you be a little bit more specific on the how to of direct cable connection
? I am new at this and am trying to teach myself. Thanks for all your help.

[Toaster]

As far as Linux is concearned, avoid the 386 and possibly the 486. Win3.xx is fine for either and win9x would perform badly.
Dos/windows is still a viable alternative.
If the 486 is 66mhz or greater, then maybe win95 and NOT win98.
Linux is a great O/S, none better as yet in my humble opinion, however, with the support asked for from many users a functional minimum for a "graphical" Linux install is a pentium class system and 32MB memory for a usable minimum. Win9x is a pig and requires more and gives you less. Installing a "temp" CD-ROM is a good solution then moving it to each system as you go.

[glc]

Win 95a runs fairly well on a 386DX40 with 20 megs ram.

Why don't you just pull the hard drives and stick them in a Win 95 machine with a CD drive, format and sys them, and copy the cabs into a directory? The original 95 cabs only take up about 35 megs. Then you can just boot it up with a 95 system disk, activate the partition, and run the setup from the cabs directory.

You would need 95 already installed to use direct cable connection.

[Toaster]

On DOS 6.0 and greater is 2 progies of merit.
They are "intersvr and interlnk.exe". Both are great little progies and couple them with xcopy, times are good for moving cab files.

[RayH]

The original Windows 95 is 13 floppies. I have them all.......

[england001]

running `95 on a 386 dx40 - you cannot be serious !! How long do you expect to live - it may just load by then,

[glc]

england - it's been running as a workstation on a customer of mine's network just peachy for about 4 years now. It has a 1.2 gig hard drive and is used for running Quicken and Office 95. It takes a while to boot up - about 2 minutes, but once it's up it just keeps on chugging. It's set up with a fixed 75 meg swapfile and Vcache is limited to 5 megs.

Minimum requirements as per Mickysoft for Win 95a: 386DX25 with 4 megs ram.