Compaq LTE 5380, 32 Meg of memory, 3.1 Gig hard drive, cirrus logic 7548 video chip, only laptop in 5000 LTE series that is 1024x768(I Think), and a borrowed internal CD-Rom drive.

Laptop running Win95 and no other application software. Partition Magic 4.0 used to partition hard drive. RedHat Linux 6.1.

Partition Magic 4.0. Excellent partitioning software. This was obtained at an auction site for about 30% less than retail. This was used to create multiple extended partitions on a single physical drive running just Win95. The Partition Magic book has a good example on how to do this.

RedHat Linux 6.1 I obtained for about $6.50 including shipping from www.linuxcentral.com

Lilo was used instead of Boot Magic. I was unable to get the Laptop to boot once I installed Boot Magic. To repair the Master Boot Record and start over, I booted off a floppy and I issued FDISK /MBR to the boot drive c:.

For the install process I installed from the hard drive and not the CD.

Laptop preparation: From Win95 I ran scan disk on hard drive. Full scan including surface scan. Ran defag to make sure all data is at the beginning of the harddrive.

I then did a full backup of my Laptop.

Used Partition Magic to resize the only partition on the 3.1gig drive to a 1500meg drive. This left 1500meg as free space at the end of the hard drive. I then used the free space to create another extended primary partition. I then used this 2^nd extended partition to create a logical 66 meg Linux swap drive and then used the rest of the space on this 2^nd extended partition to create a logical Linux Ext2 drive.

My laptop will only allow me to have either the Floppy or CD-ROM drive in the laptop case.

Booted into Win95 with the CD-ROM drive installed. I then copied the following files from the RedHat CD:

Copied D:\DOSUTILS\AUTOBOOT directory to C:

Copied D:\DOSUTILS\AUTOBOOT.BAT file to C:

I then commented out everything in my Autoexec.bat and Config.sys files. Then I Hit START, SHUTDOWN, RESTART IN MS-DOS MODE.

From the DOS C: prompt, enter AUTOBOOT, to execute this BAT file. This will look for the appropriate files in the C:\AUTOBOOT directory. During the initial part of the install, RedHat Linux loaded drivers for my internal CD-ROM drive.

Ran Disk Druid. This showed the Win95 partition, and the 2 Linux partitions. I just highlighted the Linux partitions and selected edit just to provide the mount point. I used the 66Meg partition as the Linux Swap and the other Linux partition as the "/" drive. I only set up the "/" drive and did not set up any other Linux partitions. I then let the install format the drives and check for bad spots on the physical disk.

Twice during the install process, the install seemed to lockup. I was unable to use the mouse or keyboard to click OK on some of the questions during the install process. I pushed the Suspend button, then pushed it again and this seemed to free up the laptop. The install continued.

During XConfig the install correctly identified the video chip. I then selected: LCD 1024x768 as the monitor type.

As for LILO, where it asks where to install LILO, I selected /dev/hda1 Master Boot Record.

• LiLAC Linux with Laptop computers
• Linux Laptop page
• Linux Laptop support database
• Linux Documentation Project
• The Xfree86 Project
• Linuxberg - Linux software