Linux and SETi

I have a couple of spare parts lying around the house and I have no HDs, but tons of floppies. What do I need to get a machine up and crunching with Linux? I know nothing about it.

There are a few distros that can actually be run off of floppies. Tiny Linux, I believe, is one of them.

I would suggest you download and burn red hat. It's pretty fool proof for beginners. The only confusing part for people used to windows is how to partition and format the drives. You'll generally want at least three partitions. You'll need to mount one as your root (idicated by a slash in linux /) one as /home or /usr, and then a swap partition. The swap partition is usually about double the size as the amount of ram you have in the system. There are some diskless versions out there, but I'm not familiar with them. If you want to setup diskless systems quicky and easily take a look at this distribution:

http://k12ltsp.org/contents.html

I ran SETI on Linux for a while - some of the Linux firewall bunch run it on their firewall.

It is possible to run it totally off of floppy, but a quick scan on www.freshmeat.net didn't show any.

TC - good comments on RedHat.

Fishy - Floppy versions of linux abound, but if you are learning and want to experiment I think you'd be happy with just a bit o' hard drive space for some elbow room. The trick with those floppies is trying to cram everything you need onto just one - a tedious yet gentle exercise (much like overclocking )

Try this: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Pre-Installation-Checklist/index.html

...Z

It would be easier to boot Linux from a CD-ROM.

This may be exactly what you're looking for - mini linux that boots from flopy specifically for running seti. No HD required

http://www.myurl.net/seti/minipc.htm

Ned

has any one tried this yet? it looks really neat. i don't know much about linux so some of the setup instructions under the linux distro site where confusing. it just stinks that it doesn't have the network stuff set up right. maybe some linux expert on here could do it. i would love to try this.

If networking could be setup - maybe for a tulip compatible nic, then this would be about as easy as the other diskless workstation idea. A linux seti client can be configured to work with a seti queue server running on a windows machine, so if networking can be setup with this floppix version it would be great.