[lug] Small Linux for Laptop

[Jeffrey Siegal]

ljp wrote:
> 
> On Saturday 29 September 2001 05:48 pm, you wrote:
> > I recently bought a cheap but old laptop to use at school (a Toshiba
> > Satellite 400cs, if it matters) that only has 16M of RAM, a 75Mhz Pentium
> > processor, ~1 Gb HDD, no CD drive, and now a PCMCIA ethernet card.
> > Problem is, when I tried to install KRUD 7.1 on it (with nfs), I anaconda
> > told me that I didn't have enough memory to install.  I should have
> > expected this, I suppose.  I would still like to install Linux, however.
> > Does anyone have any suggestions as to a smaller, older if necessary
> > distribution that I could put on it?
> 
> I doubt you'll get X to work on that, and if you do it'll be slow.

X will work fine.  I used to use X on 1 MHz MicroVAX IIs with 4MB of
RAM, and it was fine.  What won't be fine are most graphical desktops or
frameworks.  But just using xterm (and other small X apps) and a small
window manager is entirely feasible.