It's a 10 year old model PCMCIA Versa Series NEC TECHNOLOGIES

It has serial ports
It has a paralell port for a printer
It has a floppy drive
an adapter from old but it has no CD READER.
It doesn't have a cat5 female or network card with it.


It runs Windows 3.1 with Word perfect 6.0 running pretty well.


It probably has less than 500MB hard drive space

2 Questions:


1. What kind of hardware would be needed?

I'm wondering some kind of adapter cable for USB / SERIAL would be nice to install from a desktop computer or an external CD reader or hard drive.


2.

What lightweightlinux distribution & open source OFFICE application software would be best to make it a spiffy little application software toy?

A decent word processor compatible with MSword & a decent little spreadsheet compatible with excel would be nice.


I'm thinking "Peanut Linux" or "damn small linux" might be nice.

IT HAS 18 MB OF RAM

18MB is of no use for X!!!

though i have heard good things abt gentoo and vector

Yah forget about X...

I would push for Slackware... runs great on i486!

u might try the best typesetting program for ur office needs: LATEX or TEX
But i really doubt the X will run.
On the other hand, u can try very old versions distros with very old versions of X and stuff.

I think it's quite possible to use X... just get BlackBox.... that's usefull. Applications... I may need to look for something, 'cause the best ones (KOffice and OpenOffice) won't run on it (KOffice even may but it needs KDE). For Word you may use Abiword. Spreadshet I don't know 'cause I don't use them...