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Installing Linux On Old Hardware?
cptdondo writes "I've got an old laptop that I've been trying to resurrect. It has a 486MHz CPU, 28 MB of RAM, a 720 MB HD, a 1.44MB floppy drive, and 640x480 VESA video. It does not have a CD drive, USB port, or a network port. It has PCMCIA, and I have a network card for that. My goal is to get a minimal GUI that lets me run a basic browser like Dillo and open a couple of xterms. I've spent the last few days trying to find a Linux distro that will work on that machine. I've done a lot of work on OpenWRT, so naturally I though that would work, but X appears to be broken in the recent builds — I can't get the keyboard to work. (OK, not surprising; OpenWRT is made to run on WiFi Access Point hardware which doesn't have a keyboard...) All of the 'mini' distros come as a live CD; useless on a machine without a CD-ROM. Ditto for the USB images. I'm also finding that the definition of a 'mini' distro has gotten to the point of 'It fits on a 3GB partition and needs 128 MB RAM to run.' Has Linux really become that bloated? Do we really need 2.2 GB of cruft to bring up a simple X session? Is there a distro that provides direct ext2 images instead of live CDs?"
Use Voyage Linux!
It's a stripped down Debian that's designed to run on embedded devices, and run entirely in RAM. It keeps Debian's APT package manager for super easy installation. Only 128MB or disk space (tiny base install) required for the base install. I use this distro on my PC Engines Alix board for a audiophile USB music server.
In regards yo getting it installed, you can either take out the HD and do the install on another machine or beg-borrow/steal a PCMCIA USB adapter.
If you use X, I would recommend a super lightweight window manager like Openbox, or better yet Awesome. You should also check out dvtm; 'tis a console tiling manager. Cool, eh?