my sister has this laptop, but it runs like a dog with windoze on it, i told her i'd put ubuntu 8.10 on it and make it run nice for christmas and (maybe) get the sims to run under wine for her, thats all well and good, except that it's only got 128MB of RAM...

i tried setting 1GB of my USB flash drive as swap space, but this just makes it freeze on boot, if it's not plugged in as it boots i get a command line (with the obvious errors that X couldnt load coz there's innsufficient RAM), but i have basic linux control at the command line, HOWEVER, if i plug the USB drive in after boot it doesnt get recignised, i really dont want to go and download the text based installer because i'm going on holidays on sunday and wont be back until christmas day

so if anyone could help it would be muchly appreciated

(i have a floppy drive and cannot boot from USB)

Bump! can someone please help me?

Only 128MB, and welcome back...

You have a CD drive?

The problem is that a newer distribution of linux with Gnome or KDE is not going to function with so little RAM.

You might download a live-cd of PuppyLinux or VectorLinux Light, distributions for smaller, older machines. You may have to specify the parameters to load to get linux to boot, but Puppy and Vector have their own forum to help you. You can also try other of the light linuxs. Here is the live-cd list. You can also google for linux 128MB RAM and see what the others use. Google says using USB as swap is not good for the life of the USB.

http://www.livecdlist.com/

i am aware that it would reduce the life of the drive, i was just trying to get the machine to boot the drive, thankyou for the post, i managed to use DSL to boot it into linux and then did a web install of debian, then changed the repo's to ubuntu repo's and proceeded to install the kernel and the ubuntu-desktop packages which converted this debian installation to ubuntu 9.04

What...

That was a good end-around to get you to Ubuntu, but what window manager and desktop did you install that worked well with the 128MB of RAM?

gnome works ok if you create enough swap, i ended up using XFCE though

and i only ended up downloading 300mb instead of what would normally be a 700+mb download