[Dclug] Installing puppy on a 486

[MICHAEL PENDER]

I think you can also install Puppy Linux as a bootable image on a USB
drive.  You should then be able to install Puppy either by using it as a
bootable drive, or by altering the USB drive configuration to appear as
though it is a (really large) floppy disk.  I should mention that I
haven't actually tried this--I'm not that fond of Puppy and haven't used
it for a several years.

A second option is to remove the internal drive from the Thinkpad and
partition it, copy the Puppy image to one of the partitions, and then
use FDISK to make the Puppy partition bootable.  This is a variation on
the trick for playing CDROM games from your hard drive that were meant
to run from the CDROM.

Someone already suggested removing the hard drive and installing Puppy
with the hard drive in a different computer.  However, I don't know if
the hard drive of a Thinkpad is removable.  Even if it is, the other
computer will likely have a different hardware configuration
(troubleshooting x-window display drivers is a pain) and the install may
set up different paths (hda versus hdc, etc.).

Instead of removing the internal drive, you could copy the Puppy image
to an external USB (or Firewire) drive and use that to install Puppy. 
This is essentially just a variation on the first approach I mentioned,
using an external drive instead of a USB flash drive.

In theory, you could also install Puppy using an external CDROM drive. 
I say "in theory" because I've never seen an external CDROM drive that
can be used as a boot medium for a machine of the apparent age of the
laptop described.  I doubt it would be easy to find an external CDROM
drive that would work for you unless IBM actually made one specifically
for the ThinkPad.

- Mike