I have a vintage 2001 laptop (Vaio R505) which is very hardware limited. Fortunately there is much that works, but I can't figure how to make it work better. The two biggest constraints are 256MB RAM and no floppy or CD and it cannot boot from a USB drive because the BIOS is ancient.It does have enough disk for a shrunken WinXP partition, an Ubuntu Lucid partition, swap, and 60MB unallocated. Even stripped down Xubuntu installation with a custom built minimal kernel is a little too heavyweight for the small core and ultra-slow swap.I'd like to install Damn Small Linux because it is designed for machines of this vintage and specs but I can't figure out how to get it loaded. To get Xubuntu on, I started WUBI in windows which is designed to then install Unbuntu. My bootloader is now GRUB2 and happily boots Linux or XP (which I keep around for no good reason).I'm almost certain that putting the right materials on my free partition and telling GRUB about the DSL installation is possible, I just don't know what the right materials are.As this is a pretty odd circumstance and I am capable of rolling a custom kernel, I'm mostly looking for pointers to information to demystify the boot process and what update-grub needs to see to add DSL to the boot-list.
Bootstrapping a DSL installation onto a machine with no BIOS boot support
grub2;boot loader
Since you already have grub installed the hard part is already done. To proceed:create a partition in your 60 MB unallocated space, create filesystemBoot into ubuntuloop-back mount the isocp the contents to your new filesystemadd a grub entryboot ...1) For example via mkfs.ext33)4) see the frugal_liste.sh script available at the dsl mirrors - something along these lines:mount /mnt/$SOURCE/current.iso /mnt/iso -t iso9660 -o loop=/dev/loop0cp -r /mnt/iso/KNOPPIX /mnt/$TARGETcp -r /mnt/iso/boot /mnt/$TARGET5) Check out this howtoYou have adapt these lines:title           Damn Small Linuxroot            (hd0,0)kernel         /boot/isolinux/linux24 root=/dev/sda1 ro lang=us toram noeject frugalinitrd          /boot/isolinux/minirt24.gzThat means you have to adapt the root line, the root= parameter and the paths according to your setup.