Arch Linux

chilebiker

Member

From: Zurich, Switzerland

Registered: 2006-07-18

Posts: 161

installing arch on old laptop without internet

i've been playing around with linux for the past month, mostly using mandriva and for a very short time slack and ubuntu. mandriva works well and was definitely a smooth change for a long time windows user. due to a dying harddisk i even learend some of the basics pretty damn fast . now my machine is back up and running with w2k, mandriva and (soon) arch.

i have an old laptop (hp omnibook with a 600 mHz celeron, 10 gb hdd, 128 mb ram, s3 graphics card and no internet connection). it's being used as an OFFLINE INFOSYSTEM (which is a simple but quite extensive webpage) for my clients, running mandrake 10.1 for the past year without problems. the only drawback is the long boot time and the bad font rendering. to speed things up i'd like to try arch.

in short: i need a fast booting system with basically only a webbrowser running my webpage offline. NOTHING ELSE! would you recommend arch for that? remember, i can't update any packages online, because there's no possibility to connect that laptop to the internet.

what do you suggest? what packages do i have to install from the cd to get a small, fast system? obviously the base system and xorg. but then what, and is everything to be found on that cd?

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Don't panic!

twiistedkaos

Member

Registered: 2006-05-20

Posts: 666

Re: installing arch on old laptop without internet

No, everything isn't found on the cd. Infact, not much is if you download the "base" cd. All you get is a console based system. In which then you'll have to donwlaod xorg and a DE. Since you want a lightweight and fast system, maybe something aroud the lines of Xfce / OpenBox3.

Mr Green

Forum Fellow

From: U.K.

Registered: 2003-12-21

Posts: 5,925

Website

Re: installing arch on old laptop without internet

When you say no internet connection ... do you mean laptop has no LAN modem etc..

Does lappy have usb?

If you can burn packages (updates etc...) to cd from another machine then just pacman -U (or A) to install them

Speed wise it will be faster ubuntu & mandriva

HTH

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Mr Green

Bison

Member

From: Jacksonville, FL

Registered: 2006-04-12

Posts: 158

Website

Re: installing arch on old laptop without internet

I'm going to be honest.  Using Arch without an internet connection sucks.  Unless you can possibly temporarily get one in order to set up arch. 

But yes, it will be much faster than ubuntu and mandriva

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http://normalform.merseine.nu

lilsirecho

Veteran

Registered: 2003-10-24

Posts: 5,000

Re: installing arch on old laptop without internet

Larch LiveCD construction kit mat give you a way to do what you want.

To use it normally it requires downloading via the internet so you probably would have to use another machine to create the LiveCD with larch.  The parameters loaded would have to fit your laptop and it requires kernel26beyond to be functional.

The details are in USER CONTRIBUTIONS forum if you are inclined to study it.

The download of Larch 0.9.9 or later includes verbose readme files.  It would seem you could build it on another machine and use it on the laptop assuming your laptop is i686 compliant.

Best to you...

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