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So, I am tinkering with an old dell inspiron 2650 laptop, and it doesn't have usb boot and I have no acces to an ethernet cable. BUT I do have 10 700mb cd's anyone have ideas for me to install ubuntu on this laptop?

ps. it can't boot from dvd either...

it has about 250mb of ram and an intel pentium 4m proccessor and it ran windows xp, it ran all programs in damn small linux perfectly though...

ronan berntsen
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  • What are the specifications of the laptop? It may not have enough resources to run recent versions of Ubuntu (or even lighter variants like Lubuntu). – Archisman Panigrahi Aug 08 '21 at 18:40
  • Archisman, I will edit the post now to include the specifications thank you for replying :) – ronan berntsen Aug 08 '21 at 18:43
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    Dell 2650s were released 19 years ago, are 32-bit and 256MB of RAM. No currently-supported release of Ubuntu Desktop (nor flavor) will run on such specs. You might get Ubuntu Server or Ubuntu Core to run on it. – user535733 Aug 08 '21 at 18:46
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    user535733y , ah well I was mostly wondering about general installation methods anyway but I am realizing that ubuntu wont run on this hardware ah well – ronan berntsen Aug 08 '21 at 18:52
  • @ronanberntsen There's always a BSD variant. (o; – Paul Aug 08 '21 at 19:00
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    You may still install a very old version of Ubuntu (e.g. 10.04) and use it offline (as it will not get security updates). CD images are available at http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/10.04.0/ – Archisman Panigrahi Aug 08 '21 at 19:08
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    Also check out http://tinycorelinux.net/. Damn Small Linux was last updated in 2008, whereas TinyCore is still being developed (last update in 2021) and recommended configuration is Pentium II with 128 MB of RAM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Core_Linux – Archisman Panigrahi Aug 08 '21 at 19:18
  • I used various pentium 4, M & D boxes to test various releases up to 19.04 (when x86 or i386 was finally dropped), the last tested was Lubuntu 18.04.5 LTS in Aug-Sept 2020. however all boxes had 1GB of RAM (a single celeron reported on 732MB usable of the 1GB & it wasn't fun to use). I also used an old thinkpad t42p (pent m) that didn't have working USB ports by copying ISO to hard drive (via ethernet cable) & booting from drive itself via boot loader on machine (I used grub but I've used windows 2000 & xp bootloader long ago too) but lack of RAM is your issue; I'd use server & WM only. – guiverc Aug 08 '21 at 21:52
  • I agree with Archisman Panigrahi, Tiny core might be what you want: For spec's see: http://tinycorelinux.net/intro.html – C.S.Cameron Aug 10 '21 at 01:49
  • If your computer has USB slots, Plop Boot Manager may help it boot from USB. https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html – C.S.Cameron Aug 10 '21 at 02:04

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