Linux on a tired old laptop?
 

Here's my situation:

I have an old Compaq LTE5280 laptop. It's got a Pentium 120mhz processor, 32MB of RAM, 1MB of video RAM, and just over 1GB on the HD. I've got some sort of PCMCIA network card in the laptop, along with a PCMCIA modem.

Also, you have to swap the floppy & CD-ROM drives, so you can't have both in the machine at once. (Though I can setup the machine such that it boots into DOS and can recognize the CD-ROM drive).

It's basically unusable under Windows 9X.

I'd like to try Linux on it. All I really need on it is a web browser (so my wife and I can check mail via the WWW), the ability to SSH to my web host (which isn't a big deal), and the ability to (later) setup my PCMCIA modem. As best I can tell, GNOME and KDE are too much for my machine - so I'd be using X Windows version 3.

I've tried Vector Linux, with no success - apparently, you can't run the setup from the CD-ROM. I've also had no luck with the instructions they give.

So here's my questions:

1) Are there any mistakes in my (newbie) logic?

2) Can I get X running on the laptop and it be usable?

3) Are there any other distros I should try? Would I be able to install a Debian or Slackware (which are above my level of understanding, admittedly) and it be usable?

All help is appreciated.

Your machine is quite usable. Although it's not running Linux, I've got a similar machine running OpenBSD with X and Fluxbox. It's rather snappy considering the hardware.

Are you running a recent version of OpenBSD, or an older version?

I'm concerned about the version of X, as I've seen ver. 4 is for faster machines than mine.

I'm running OpenBSD 3.1 on it. XFree86 is at 4.2.0. It's done pretty well so far considering that it only has 32MB RAM and 2 MB video RAM. It doesn't have a CD so my only install option was floppy and FTP.

Hmm - I'll give it a try. I had heard you shouldn't bother with XFree86 4 unless you had a Pentium 200 or greater...