I decided to ditch Tiny Core because of compile issues.

I am going back to Slackware and I'm happy again. It feels like home. I was finally able to get Slackware installed on this IBM 380XD with a 6gb hdd!! Irssi is also working great.

For those of you who own a similar machine circa 1998. Make sure you boot the huge.s kernel in the beginning and all you have to do is add the boot flag to /dev/sda1. Dont worry about creating a swap partition because you have limited space anyway.

So, at the step where you use fdisk make sure to type 'a' and select the first sda1 partition. That will create the boot flag which is very important! You usually don't have to with newer machines though.

My conclusion is that Slackware should be your real choice for small machines no matter how small they are.

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The machine is a Thinkpad 310 with a Pentium 75-280 running at 133Mhz which I think is a Pentium III.

It has 48MB of memory.

It has a 3.2Gb hard drive split as 900M for /dev/hda1, 1.9G for /dev/hda2 and 250M for /dev/hda3 which is swap. /dev/hda1 holds a copy of the install disk and /dev/hda2 has the operating system installed on it such as /boot, /usr, /root, /etc/, /proc and so on with about 250M of free disk space.

It takes 1m 55s to get to the login prompt and a further 5 seconds, to logon as root, and get to the command line. I've not done any bench mark tests!

It's running Slackware 11.0.0.

The internal battery is flat and the floppy disk drive is almost dead. I can connect an external cd drive using PARIDE.

Basically it's a museum piece.

Alex

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I put Slackware 10.2 on an old Thinkpad that had Win98 on it.
First make partitions, and give it an adequate swap partition. This backs up the small main memory size. I checked afterwards and it did not even use the swap (but it was there to cover peak usages).

Make a standard install, but be selective with your packages.

Compile a new kernel on a desktop with adequate speed.
Just save you native machine kernel compile config and start a new one.
Go through the entire menu-config and make sure the cpu type is set to what is in the laptop
and a few other Thinkpad specials are enabled. I had no trouble with this.
Because the Linux kernel does so much discovery it is like any small kernel from the Slackware distribution.
At this point you should have some access to things like a memory stick, so it easy enough
to copy the resultant kernel and modules to the laptop. Then fix your boot (lilo, Grub) to
also boot the new kernel too.

This worked so well, that I think it would also work with Slackware kernels, that warn
of needed 128M in the requirements. It is very likely that only a few package installs would actually use that much memory. Even the newest kernels can be configured for small memories, they do not inherently need large main memory.