MrMongoose

I managed to do it in DOS, but thanks for the tip anyway! FDlinux was giving me errors. I'll try a few more then run back crying to you when it fails! I already had a few heart stopping moments when my computer refused to start up, eek!

It's called fd (I think thats an acronym for floppy disk) linux. It seems pretty badly documented and out of date, but it pretty much fits my requirements exactly. What do you mean by running it from a floppy? Just copy the exe onto the floppy and run it from there? What difference should that make? This would be so much easier if had more than one floppy!

That might help! Though before that, I think I've found an easier one to install, so I'd like to try that... Do you know anything about partitioning? From what I've read I have to delete my primary dos partition then create a new partition before running my boot disk. The only problem is that fdisk (which windows 95 insists i use) wont let me delete my primary partition because its unlocked, but then when I use the "lock c:" command in dos, i get an error message- "locking operation failed" Any ideas?

Do you kill your own mice? I'm just wondering what the accepted way for killing mice to disect is. I'm sure there are plenty of nutters out there who want to kill you!

Thanks, I'll look that up and see if it'll do the job! As for my odd requirements.. Well... The only network socket it has is the old version of pcmia which is incompatible with modern cards, and the old cards cost more than the computer is worth, so network isn't and option really (thus no point filling my HD with the network files) AND it doesn't even have a usb port. So basically, floppy is my only option unless I could transfer a larger version over on several files, install it from the HD and finally delete windows. GUI- as im only going to be editting code having anything other than the simplest text editor seems like a waste of my 50mb of ram and 800mb of HD. Basically I do a lot of work with old fortran code in linux with no gui, so I'd like to set up a similar setup on my really old laptop to have an educational play around when I'm nowhere near a PC which can connect to the server it's all on. Seems even that is too big. This could be more difficult than I thought!

I've found several guides for this and downloads of specific distributions which all seem to very simply tell me how to put Linux onto my pc using a cd. The computer I'm trying to install on doesn't have the luxury of a cd drive. Does anyone know any good distributions that I can install with just one 3.5" floppy. The computer is old so I don't want anything other than a simple efficient version- no GUI, I don't even want to be able to connect it to my network. My requirements are that it should boot up, have directories, be able to run VI (text editor), be able to run scripts, tansfer data to/from a floppy, be able to compile and run programs in fortran77, and optionally fortran 90 as quickly and efficiently (both in terms of RAM and HD space) as possible. There just seems to be too much choice, and very little of it seems to fit my needs.

UGGGGHHHH Thank god everything of importance that I do is metric!

The density is the mass per volume, and one form or the perfect gas equation is p=rRT (r being the density, normally denoted by rho) So r=p/RT The density will depend on the gas that the flame consists of which will typically be a mixture of oxygen and the fuel youre burning. If you know the density at a certain pressure and temperature then you can work it out at any other pressure and temperature. The simple answer is that finding a reference state purely from theory is impossible to do accurately for all but the simplest cases, so it is measured from experiments.

Wait.. do they know that all the hats are black apart from two which are red?

Doesn't each series have one limit? Unless you're talking about an infinite number of series, im afraid you've lost me.

What I'm getting at is that you can't say anything is equal to some number called infinity. i.e 1+2+3+4+...=infinity. It would however be correct to say that 1+2+3+4... tends to infinity, but thats not saying that there is some number infinity which the sum gets closer to everytime, it's just strange terminology to say the series gets bigger. On the other hand, the adjective infinite and adverb infinitely are quite unambiguous and useful for describing limits.

Just to clarify, I'm from england and I was calling Imperial units silly. Though I do regularly drive a few miles home after having several pints and measure myself in feet... And measure my mass in stones and pounds... which apparently most Americans don't know about.

The law follows the general consensus of morality. If enough people are outraged by something, they'll form a strong enough protest to change the law, so the law to some extent encompasses the morals that benefit the populations beliefs as a whole. With this in mind, I realise that any opinions I have that differ from the law are inadequate and as such, lead my life as evilly as the law will let me.

The world started it... I just turned a playground fight into a nuclear war:o I never claimed that there was no plasma in a flame, just that the largest part of a flame will generally be made of gas, which in my opinion makes it more proper to speak of a flame as gas than as plasma. I still don't see the relevance of the fluorescent tube though. The two have some things in common, but a whole lot more is different.

THANK YOU. I thought the whole world was against me:mad:

Oxygen rich is specific to some flames, and fluorescent bulbs irrelevantly do contain a lot of plasma. Last time though:( I was hoping for a convincing argument before you gave up.

Oh yeah.. sorry. I'm not much good with silly foreign units. I was thinking 200lbf was 1000N whilst 2000lbm was 1000kg (or something of that order of magnitude)

Theory that has a strong correlation with repeatable empirical measurements matters until similar measurements disagree with the theory.

...and a good method it is too! Its almost worth forgetting whatever experiment required a mass measurement and just getting excited about the hydrostatics!

Well, for starters, it's not plasma;) But it'll have a weight corresponding to its mass which is just the sum of all the particles that it is made of. As fire's generally got a fairly low density (being a warm gas), it will generally be quite light, but to put numbers to that, you'd need to specify what is being burnt under what conditions.

Well in reality an observer (say you) and another object (say earth) orbit around thier combined centre of mass, which if we take a reference frame rotating such that the relative angle of the line of centres of the two masses is constant in the reference frame, then they just stay a constant distance apart and theres no reason to assume there is a force acting on either. But then when you consider the fact that a third object (the sun) is orbitting us, both our observer-earth system and the sun must be accelerating towards each other to maintain an elliptical orbit. So whilst the first of my two paragraphs is entirely theoretical (and wrong), the second paragraph shows the truth by drawing from reality

Arrrr!

Isn't theory all that matters? (other than custard)

and in the simplest ideal case where there are no losses at all, then ALL the kinetic energy will be converted back to electrical energy.

I'm sorry, but how does "the sum of a finite number of infinite numbers" mean the same thing as "the sum of an infinite number of finite numbers"? There is no problem with calculus, because while the sum of a finite number of infinite numbers doesn't exist, the sum of an infinite number of finite numbers does exist, so can you please stop arguing against a point that I didn't make?