Hi,

I've been playing around with this old laptop for the past few weeks:

NEC Versa V/75
486 DX4 75 Mhz
20 Mb RAM
540 Mb Hard Drive (I have 6 of these to work with)
No floppy or CD-ROM drive whatsoever, I used a 3.5" to 2.5" IDE adapter on the drive to install and it seems to work quite nicely. An excellent little thing to have for only $5.00.

2 different network cards:
1 Belkin Wired
1 DLink DWL-650 RevP (prism driver) (Wireless)

I've been experimenting with different distros trying to get the best configuration to work with all of my hardware...

Currently I have Redhat 7.0 running and working with the Belkin pcmcia card, but this distro sucks. My serial port doesnt seem to work with it and getting samba working efficiently was a chore to say the least.

I've tried the BSD's to no avail, for some reason I couldnt get them to recognize the pcmcia cards but could probably get them to work with a little more tinkering.

My ultimate goal is to have a laptop that can access my wireless network and I don't care if I have to get a different card which I may have to because I am not impressed at all with this DLink DWL-650. There are actually 5 different versions of this card each being supported by a different driver and no "official" linux support except some drivers written by others that need to be compiled which, on this current distro (RH7.0) cant be done since I had to forgo the development packages due to a lack of available drive space.

I've tried putting the newer RH Distros on (8.0, 9.0, Fedora) , but they seem to want at least 500 Mb for even the most minimal of installations, which, I find hard to believe since I've seen many posts where people have put *NIX on even the tiniest hard drives.

So my question is, Which Distro should I attempt to put on this little lappy that will allow me the features that i want. To summarize I want:

Wireless networking
Serial communications
File Sharing (Samba)

I don't care about any kind of XWindows and am quite content with just a commandline and, for all intents and purposes, would prefer it anyway.

Thanks for your advice!

-cor-

here http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...596#post854596
there is a similar post ,.. i recommend you install Slack or debian with minimal packages or with the packages u need,...

I was in the same situation a while ago. I ended up using Vector linux.
http://www.vectorlinux.com Its got alot of options and still uses X. I wouldnt reallly recommend using x, but if you must there are several window managers that I would use, one is called XD640 and can be found here http://www.oksid.ch/xd640/. I would also try WindowLab which can be found here http://www.nickgravgaard.com/windowlab/

Another distro that I think would work well for you, but I have yet to try is DeLi Linux http://delilinux.berlios.de/#technik this distro is specifically made for old school systems. It looks pretty stripped right outta the box. Good luck!

Also here is some required reading on old laptops and linux

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/doc...b-Laptops.html

Thanks for the suggestions. I ended up using slackware and I have to say that I am very impressed with it so far, but I will be experimenting with other distros as well since I found 6 hard drives for this thing on e-bay for a total of $30. I just couldnt pass it up. I'll give that site and Vector a good looking over though.

-cor-