windows 3.1 upgrade.

[razled]

OK I have an old laptop, the one where I cant get to see my cd rom in dos, its a pcmcia card/cd rom.
I have installed dos 6.2 and the windows 3.11 workgroups,
I have tried to install my 3com pcmcia network and it wont work, I have tried using the drievr not listed function but it comes up with oemsetup.inf is not found how can I change the oem bit, to point it to the 3com dos driver thats on the disk ?
or is there an easier way ?
I have a pcmcia cd rom and card, and driver but that wont install, nor the newtwok card, please help, I know windows 3.11 is old there must be a way to upgrade this machcine ?

 

[pmonett]

Good heavens ! A 3.11 setup ? Well, that's pretty much prehistory nowadays, isn't it ?
OK, enough pulling your leg. The real issue I see is twofold : obviously Win 3.11 is way beyond being able to work with modern hardware (no driver updates for that program since ages), and second, a laptop from those times will almost certainly crawl with hideous slowness under a Win98 setup, however much RAM you manage to squeeze into it (as much as . . . 32Mb ?).
The only obvious choice is to install some version of Linux. I'm sure a Red Hat would do fine and look positively spiffy on whatever CPU still survives in that old shell.

 

[razled]

Sounds promising, never ventured into linux, is it available on floppy ?
Is it free? Was considering buying windows 95 on floppy disk, which is available form ebay.

Is linux easy to use ? I have the cd rom driver for windows but I dont know if it would have a linux driver, as it took me ages to find the windows driver, it would probably be the same for the modem/network card,
Can you "TALK" to a windows network ? and surf the web through a windows server?
Sorry so many questions.

 

[pmonett]

Is Linux free ? If you can download it, yes. If you have to get it from a store, you'll be paying the packaging, but normally you do not pay the OS.
Is it easy to use ? More and more, but I do not think anyone is going to say that it is user-friendly yet.
As for networking, you use a protocol to do that, not an OS. So, if you have TCP/IP on both machines, they can "talk". For browsing, there are hundreds of thousands of penguins (Linux fans) doing it every day, and ready to swear that their browser is the best (never tried it myself).
Finally, you'll install it from DOS, so you'll just need the ATAPI driver you already have. When the Linux kernel boots, it will have its own ATAPI driver, and will be quite able to access the CD drive - normally.
Linux used to be available only on floppy, but nowadays the distros come on CD. Never seen a Mandrake or Red Hat version in floppy form, but I would not be overly surprised if someone had one. Given that distros are on 2 CDs, I'd hate to think of amount of juggling you'd have to go through, though !
Now, I must say that I am not a Linux expert, so there is certainly someone who could do a better job of answering.
But up to now, I think I've covered the basics.

 

[razled]

thanks, will stick it in google and let that do the rest

 

[edfair]

You could transfer the required files from another machine using 6.22's intersrv/interlnk, several serial port networking solutions, or laplink.
Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[razled]

I have a Null modem cable, and have downloaded laplink/interserv/interlnk, but keep getting unable to make connection, have added the device=c:\dos\intelnk.exe etc to the config.sys file, to no avail