>
>Hi there,
>
>Some days ago someone gave his very old laptop to me and I want to install
>Linux on it. Is it possible to install Linux on such an old laptop?
>
>80386, 4 MB RAM, 60 MB HDD.
>
Disk should be your biggest problem, RAM you second biggest one...
You usually say that 4 MB RAM are the absolutely minimum to install
linux - but you can forget X11. I myself did install linux on
an i80386, 8 MB RAM including X11 - but starting X11 took some minutes
and so did starting netscape. Working under X11 was almost impossible,
but in plain textmode working was okay (word 5.0 under dosemu
was almost as fast as under DOS). Compiling a kernel took the whole
night...
With only 4 MB your computer will have to use its swap
partition quite often, so you are advised to use at least
8 MB for a swap partition (I myself used 16 MB out of 100 MB)
But the greatest problem I see is to find a Distribution which fits
inside 60 MB minus swap - this is really difficult. Of the standard
distributions I would recommend debian (suse not at all, but also
redhat (which I used) needs to much disk space, but I am afraid you
will have to have a look at linux.org to find out some other
distributions, which take less disk space (linux-lite or s.th. like that)
Just for your interest: Have a look at
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kharker/linux-laptop/
Bye, Juergen.
--
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* Juergen Leising; email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
* http://www.stud.uni-bayreuth.de/~a0037/ *
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