Suggestions to both sunshine_wonder and Matthew Guenther: I have run Debian on a Compaq Aero (ancient machine) with 16 meg Ram and a 500 meg hard drive and a 486sx 16MHz processor for years now.
For installation my favourite option is plip + floppies. Much faster than the serial port and usually easier to setup initially than pcmcia. I have heard the ocasional report of someone not being able to get plip working but it has always worked for me. For allowing the install of lots of software I use e2compr. It has been reliable enough for me and let me put everything I needed on the mahcine. e2compr: http://www.netspace.net.au/~reiter/e2compr Don't compress executables or library binaries unless they really don't get used very often. I was able to compress most of the xemacs/emacs directories and /usr/src (compiles take somewhat longer). I have used double and zlib (?) before with some sucess but e2compr has worked much better for me. For Xwindow applications I would typically run the X server and the app as the sole client quite sucessfully. I even ran KDE for a while but wouldn't recomend it for the impatient among us! Depending on what you are intending to do you may find the "(x)emacs as an environment" approach productive. I typically run xemacs on a console and run a shell, VM mail, edit various files, browse directories and manage files all from within xemacs. It takes a while to get used to but on a low resource machine can be very efficient. Oh, and xemacs will also browse the web, albeit slowly and you never have to use the mouse. Note however that (x)emacs makes good use of the mouse with gpm on the console. I haven't run Win 3.1 in years so I can't comment on which would be faster - especially without knowing what tools you intend to use. Matt -- sunshine_wonder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on 10/18/99 04:52:00 PM To: laptop group <debian-laptop@lists.debian.org> cc: Subject: another newbie Hi. I've been reading about Linux for a while now and was thinking about putting it on my ancient laptop. It's not my main pc, but it's a good traveler and I'd like to get a few more miles out of it. It's a Compaq Lite Lte 20, a 386sx 20mhz with 10 megs of ram, and a 600 meg hard drive. I'm running DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11 on it right now. It's not hard to find big chunky distributions on CD-ROM but how do I shoehorn Linux on to my laptop? Is a 600 meg hard drive big enough for the OS, a word processor, and a game or two? Will it run more slowly with Linux than it does with Dos 6.22? Is there some kind of GUI that will run as well as Win 3.1 does? Any help would be graciously appreciated. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
