Cool.  I've got something like that running Debian.  My think pad is a little 
newer, a P90 with 24MB of RAM and I put in a 5 gig hard disk. People like the 
thinkpad's small form factor.

Your machine will be slow but usable and those thinkpads are hard to kill.  
32MB of RAM is not bad, you might be able to run X.  Does it have PCMCIA slots 
on the side?  If it does, you can have dial up, ethernet and wireless 
networking on it.  Compact flash cards are another useful thing to do with 
those slots.  A little research and surgury on the battery could replace the 
functioning bits, IBM's caddies have standard hardware inside them.  There 
might also be a CD available,  Getting the thing to boot off a CD can be a 
chore, but they are good storage when you can't get to your network with 
reasonable bandwith. 

Debian has a floppy set that works.  They and use instructions are on their 
first CD of the install set.  It might be easier to install a base system on 
another machine that can take a CD and then do a network install to configure 
the rest.  

There are plenty of text mode word processors available.  What kind of text do 
you want to push around?  

Depending on what you want, you could even dual boot the thing.  The Linux side 
could add networking to your old dos stuff.  

On 2003.11.26 07:43 Chopin Cusachs wrote:
> 
> I was blessed with an early Christmas present,
> an IBM ThnkPad from the early 1990s.  It is a
> 486 33Mhz with 32MB of memory and a roughly
> 300MB hard drive.   Does not support CD, but
> has 2.88 MB floppy drive.  Battery is bad, but
> it runs DOS.  No network, but does have serial
> and parallel ports.
> 
> Would like to find a distribution of Linux that I
> could install from floppies to support word
> processor and spread sheet.  Anyone know of
> something that might fit this need?
> 
> Choppy
> 
>

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