Anyway, my friend wants me to put Linux on his old old old old laptop if only to revive it and make it somewhat useful again. Cringe at the specs for a moment

Mobile Intel® Pentium® II microprocessor 300, 266 or 233 MHz
512-KB pipelined-burst SRAM
128-bit, hardware-accelerated PCI graphics card
and more info here
and in addition he has Xircom 10/100 Network PC Card to get a megabit ethernet connection

any recommendations? I thought the laptop was a lost cause...but I promised my friend to "revive" it. :lolflag:

Why don't you give Puppy or DSL a go?

you should try small linux distributions. Some good options are:
puppy linux, CDLinux, damn small linux.

Here's what I wanted before http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/26480

Please let us know which distro works better? Share your experience with others.

This is pretty good. (By my standards.)
This is the cache size, but that's not important.

What is all important is how much total RAM the machine has. On boot-up, the "memory test" lets you know how much RAM the machine has. (The type of RAM will be SDRAM.) For a Pentium 2 laptop, this amount may be as low as 16megs or as high as 128megs...possibly higher.

If the amount of RAM is less than 32megs, then a graphical interface is more or less impossible. Sticking with Windows 95 may be the best option. However, according to your link 32megs is the standard minimum amount of RAM on that laptop.

If the amount of RAM is 32megs-64megs, then a lightweight distribution like Damn Small Linux may be the best option. A GUI is possible, but with mostly basic operations.

If the amount of RAM is between 64megs and 128megs, then you're in a "middle ground" where a lightweight distribution will perform well, but you can get a lot more functionality with a general purpose distribution like Debian, with a lightweight interface like IceWM or Fluxbox.

If the amount of RAM is 128megs or more, then I'd recommend using something like Debian, along with IceWM or Fluxbox.

Note--I have installed Debian 4.0 with its default heavyweight GNOME desktop on a 300mhz laptop with only 64megs of RAM. It WAS able to boot up the full GNOME interface. But I only logged into GNOME by mistake. On such a lightweight machine, I prefer to use IceWM or IceWM-lite.

I note that it uses NeoMagic video. So does my old Toshiba laptop. You'll want to edit xorg.conf after a Debian install to get the full 1024x768 resolution. This requires bumping down the default color depth from 24bit to 16bit.

There are a lot of things you can do to streamline a Debian install, to make it run faster/better on an old laptop like that.

it's not so old, sry... it's a pentium ii this is way more than they used to get three people to the moon and back. what do you intend to do with such a powerfull laptop?

the 512 KB are cache! not your memory. the thing has 128MB RAM which is very much. the perfect linux-box . as always, i recommend slackware. low requirements, quite unix like, no build in packet managers (ok, i know of slack-get or whatever but who wants to use it when you can compile it from source. use the source, luke).

you even have a network card!!! wow...

have fun, vadkutya

How much RAM does it have? I'd recommend Puppy or DSL if it doesn't have at least 128MB RAM. If it does have at least 128MB RAM, I'd recommend Ark Linux, which is newbie-oriented yet powerful enough for long-time professionals and power users, and can run Fluxbox from it's repos if KDE is slow.