I just purchased an old laptop off eBay, I'm now waiting for it to arrive and am not sure it will run the Mandrake 10.1 CD's that I have.

Here are the specs:
Toshiba Satellite Pro 420CDS
100mhz Pentium 1
1.4 Gb Hard Drive
40 Mb RAM
DVD-Rom Drive (SD-C2102)

So... can it run Mandrake?

This is not the first time this question has been asked. For those who also want to ask this question, please pay attention to this thread.


Mandrake likes a 500mhz processor and 64 mb ram. If you try to install without GUI, you might be able to do it. You could likely run X on that machine, but I'd use fluxbox, icewm, or windowmaker as the windowmanager. Mandrake's default install is 1400mb of software, so you'd want to select less.

Honestly, you'd be better off with Slackware or Debian on your laptop, as you can get away with more on fewer system resources. Don't go with a 2.6 kernel with that little ram. Debian Woody with the latest 2.2 kernel would be one of the best options.

I disagree.
A minimum install of MDK10.1 should be no more than 300MB's. I installed a couple of scanner servers
with 10.0 and ended up with 222MB used (minimum system + saned, no docs or mans)

Some lightweight WM and light programs should work with 40MB RAM.

What are you planning on using it for?

- Peder

I'm only going to use the laptop for OpenOffice and possibly a music notation software. That's all

Also, I'm a real Linux noob, so the Debian image compilation looks very complicated to me

As already stated, Mandrake may take more than what your machine offers. Though I'm going to go against the grain here, I'd look at something less resource intensive.. (i.e.: Vector, Slackware, etc.)

I agree partially with you. I am basing my recommendation on experience. The least powerful machine that I installed Linux on was a P-120 with 48mb ram. It had a 1.1G hd. I successfully installed Debian Woody with Windowmaker an lots of appsmin about 600mb. When I tried to use Gnome 2.0 or KDE 1.4, the machine was quite sluggish, because of the slow processor and lack of RAM. I found that the 2.4 kernel was more ram-intensive than the 2.2, and the machine worked much better with 2.2. FreeBSD 5.0 was faster, but still performed sluggishly with KDE. I realize that nearly any distro can be minimally installed (as that's how I usually try to do it when playing with a new one). I do know that a minimum install of Mandrake will confuse the heck out of a newbie if urpmi (and rpmdrake, etc) are forgotten in the install process (yes, I've done a minimum -no X install of Mandrake as well).

I have a question about the need for office software? Will you need the whole suite? Is OpenOffice the only choice you're considering? Its slow to load on a powerful machine. If you're just using the word processor, you might want to consider Abiword, which is powerful but much "lighter". Or, Koffice for the whole shebang. Its come a long way and can be installed without KDE.


edit: find out if you can take a faster processor in that laptop and if there's no difference between mobile and desktop processors back then. I have a 133 and a 166 laying around. Use the email link below if you're interested in one of them (spring is coming and they may not be staying...)

With only 40 megs of RAM Debian and almost all of the listed distros are going to have seveare swapping problems.

Even 128 megs is relatively marginal, usually requiring a "light" gui to get any sort of usable performance.

See if there is any way to increase available RAM...

Forget even trying to run OOo on a 100MHz, no matter what amount of memory.
Abiword should run (but perhaps a bit slow).

- Peder

bunnadik: His CPU is slow... but 40 megs of RAM?

Whew... I don't think the current kernel can be loaded in 40 megs with required modules.

I think the 2.6 kernel itself needs about 8MB tops (unless you include _everything_ maybe).

- Peder

That would be for a fairly paired down kernel without loaded modules.

Add the typically loaded modules, a few of the basic inits, and that 40 megs MIGHT get you a command line...

Again, been there, done that. Kernel 2.2 for that amount of ram (its still maintained and up to date) and no graphical installer. Laptop ram is hard to match up (but that's what ebay's for). My processor offer is still open, Eerath (if it'll handle mmx, I have a 233)

Just for the heck of it I took an old 400MHz and installed MDK 10.1.
Then I limited it to 28MB RAM (mem=32000000 on the boot line).

No problems starting or running abiword or gnumeric in icewm (a bit slow though) but a lot of swapping
and time to setup the contrib source to download abiword.

- Peder

Ouch...

Doesn't the unallocated RAM get utilized for a hard disk cache though, when specifying the maxmem parameters?

Nope, when you limit with mem= you limit.

I did some additional limiting:
mem=21000000 (~17MB) boots OK, icewm works.
mem=20000000 begins to boot but can't remount rootfs rw. OOM starts killing things

mem=10000000 (~6.5MB) and init=/bin/ash also works but a subsequent 'ls' triggers the OOM killer (it still works after some killing).
bash needed about 8MB.

I have tested this with an IDE disk and reiserfs. If you have SCSI disks and XFS you probably have to
add a MB or so. Perhaps mem=20000000 would've worked with ext2 instead of reiser.

Conclusion: The standard MDK10.1 kernel itself needs about 5-6MB. You need about 18MB to get a "usable" system.
Just make sure you have enough swap.

- Peder