1. Why this document

Recently, I bought a used laptop, an IBM Thinkpad 750. I was lucky to get Linux installed on it. It it has no cdrom and the floppy is useless under Linux because of some incompatibilities in the hardware. So I tried to connect it to my desktop computer which has all these useful things.

You wonder how I installed my Linux distribution on cdrom under these circumstances ?

• First I installed (using my desktop) a core system on an external zip drive with a kernel including zip drive support.
• Then I launched this kernel under DOS on the laptop and copied everything to the harddisk.
• After setting up lilo.conf and running lilo the system booted without problems :-)

Additional software packages can now be installed from the cdrom on the desktop using the little network described below. In the meantime I have a complete system with X, Netscape, KDE and so on.

This document is the summary of my experiences and is distributed in the hope that is is useful to others facing the same problem. Everything is based on my own system, running SuSE 6.0. Some things will differ to other distributions, e.g. printing.

If the commands don't work properly on your system, please let me know, especially if you already have a fix for an update.

It is assumed that you already have installed pppd, BSD printing, rpc and everything else needed on the laptop.