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Old 06-11-2004, 03:51 AM   #1
orange400
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25Mhz / 4MB RAM :: How 'bout linux?!


I have an Altima Traveler subnotebook (very small laptop), a clone of the Twinhead Subnote. This little rig is built with such excellence! I've made many mods to it, including shoving 4.5 Ah of NiMH cells in it to have a 10-hour battery life! I gave it a 4MB RAM expansion once, but the RAM fried ( ). I even bought another RAM expansion for it but fried again ... so forget that. I also have a type one PCMCIA CD-ROM I specifically bought for it! But the largest mod besides the batteries was installing a ~800MB hard drive with an overlay utility!

Enough yabba yabba ...

I'm fed up with windows 95 ... I wanna try running linux on this rig! I wouldn't mind a command-line style system at all since I'm a growing warrior at it. But smallX is an X environment for very small systems like mine! I'm definately gonna try it. But anyways, 25Mhz, 4MB RAM, ~800MB hard drive.

Which little distro would give my lapper some TLC?

Thanks all!
 
Old 06-11-2004, 04:40 AM   #2
J.W.
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DamnSmallLinux. Give it a go. www.damnsmalllinux.org -- J.W.
 
Old 06-11-2004, 04:51 AM   #3
orange400
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Hmmmmmmmm ........ how am I gonna get an iso to my lapper .......

DamnSmall is a good distro! I should have thought of that. I'm gonna work on it!
 
Old 06-11-2004, 05:04 AM   #4
orange400
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Is there any way to install dsl over a network?
 
Old 06-11-2004, 05:24 AM   #5
orange400
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I'm starting to think dsl is too heavy for my lapper and not really made for such an application ... DSL is a live cd ...
 
Old 06-11-2004, 06:56 AM   #6
duncanbojangles
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Yes, DamnSmallLinux is small, but not necessarily whippersnapper-ish on old machines. For whippersnapper-ish-ness, check out Tiny Linux . It is amazingly fast on my old 486 with 8 megs of ram (all things being considered. Still fast, but definitely won't push the limits of your current consideration of "fast"). Oh, and check out mUlinux . Another one that ran just fine on my old laptop. But, you must have a working Linux installation on any machine with a usable floppy drive in order to build the floppies for mUlinux, as they are to be superformatted to ~1.7 MB. Don't worry, it works, really! Those, I believe are more along the lines of what you are looking for.
 
Old 06-14-2004, 12:36 AM   #7
orange400
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Hey thanks! I'm gonna look at both of those distros. I know it's not gonna be rocket-fast, but who cares?? Running linux on 25Mhz is badass imo ... And yes, my other laptop, a 233Mhz Pentium MMX w/ 64MB RAM, is running sarge (debian). So I can create them floppies.

I made up a word. Schwangg.

Thanks again! I'll keep ya posted on my success
 
Old 06-14-2004, 04:35 AM   #8
orange400
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When I made the boot floppy of mulinux and tried to boot from it, my lapper says LI_ ... it's tring to load LILO, I know it, but it's failing. I've tried other disks and stuff but no success ...

Tiny Linux requires 8MB of RAM to run ...

-edit-

I finally put together a working bootdosk and tried mulinux and it even said out of memory errors ... Dang, this is pretty strapped down. I could pay up $30 and get another 4MB RAM module for it, but it'll probably fry again for some stupid reason like the two times before ... dang. I know I can do this!

I'm gonna hunt around a bit more.

Last edited by orange400; 06-14-2004 at 05:08 AM.
 
Old 09-28-2004, 10:32 PM   #9
WMD
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Bump. You can run muLinux on a 4MB system, but not the standard boot-from-boot-disk way. On the website there is a zip file (~6MB) that is a pre-cloned system (rather than disk images). Transfer it to the old machine (somehow, like disk spanning) and boot right from the hard drive. It includes base, WKS, and SRV disks, more can be added.
 
  


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