Hello, after doing much research on the topic I cant seem to find any applicable answers to my situation, I have two computers:

Dektop - Tiny computers
P3 450
64M of ram (upgrading to 1GB soon)
2x 8gb hdd (possibly upgrading soon)

Laptop - Toshiba Portege
P1 150
80M ram
1x 4gb (flash) hdd


If it is at all possible I would like to run the desktop as a XDMPC server and the laptop as a thin client, unfortunately, while I am not (yet) having problems with desktop configuration, it is the laptop I am worried about. I am having great difficulty in choosing an appropriate distribution to run on such old hardware (with x client) and yet it must also be compatible with any WIFI *pcmcia* card as there are no available USB ports etc.
While I understand this is a very specific problem and would certainly not expect anybody to help, or know off hand, it would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance.
Steve

Off the top of my head, the two I would look at are Damn Small Linux(DSL) and Puppy Linux:

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

http://puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_id=1

If you could up the ram on the laptop to 128MB, that would help a lot. If not, try creating a swap partition on the laptop. Most livecds can find and use an existing swap partition.

Be very careful with the laptop. Old ones of that vintage are probably pcmcia1 and most of the WiFi cards are pcmcia2 cards. I got fooled on this one. I have an older Compaq Presario, it is a 233 Mhz P1. Its pcmcia is only 1 and does not work with most WiFi cards.

I would recommend you go to Toshibas web site and see if you can find any doc on your machine, and look up the type of pcmcia bus you have.

I wound up buying a hard wired pcmcia1 card form Compaq. It works fine, but no WiFi, because of the pcmcia bus type.

My experience is the stores carry only the newest hardware, so finding an older vintage card can be very difficult.

As for your desktop add the ram and you should be fine.

Try some of the smaller distros on the laptop. DSL is as small as it gets. DSL takes a little getting used to, but will run on old hardware with limited resources.

Ah.. If what you say is true about pcmcia then I will have to abandon the idea, thank you both so much for your help, really appreciate it, will have to find another use for desktop, and scrap that ancient laptop once and for all, lol, thanks

I did something a little like this with my old PI laptop and my PII desktop. I did it with xhost I believe. It made it so that basically all the laptop had to do was display the stuff on it's screen, but the more powerful desktop did all the work (eg, the program would really be running on the desktop, but it's graphical output through X gets put on the laptop.

Try looking at this howto. http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Remote-X-Apps.html

My laptop was really slow (like 200MHz or something with like 32MB ram), and it worked fine this way... programs ran as fast as they would on the PII, but with a bit of graphical lag as the window drawing stuff had to go through the wireless network.