no cdrom and no nic.

Someone just gave me an old Olivetti ECHOS 44 Color laptop with those specs, I know I should dump it in the nearest trash can I find, but you can hardly see its been used (it was bought 9 years ago).

Ive been looking for a floppy based install of a linux distro, but almost all of the smallest distros is how I understand it meant to run from floppy's, not installed from them (I'm probably wrong here), also 16mb ram seems to be the lower limit on all the distros.

The reason Im asking is I could use a portable maskine able to view and edit MS Exel Worksheets.

The laptop is currently running win95b and office97, but as you can imagine, its slow, and the only use/task I have for this laptop is to view and edit those worksheets.

So if anyone know if there is a distro + prog out there who can do this on this small lappy please let me know

Um. I have no idea about the MS worksheets, but Basic is a floppy distro that's easily installed onto the harddrive and runs well within those specs - however any X is going to be extremely sluggish and, depending on your video card and monitor (mine suck) not very pleasant to look at. Really, for that equipment and that task, I'd say to leave the native system on. An X server isn't going to be much, if any, faster than Win95 and I don't see how you could do what you wanted to do from the console. If you just want a portable Linux, though, try Basic. Or do a search for a couple of recent threads on minimal Slack installs such as the A/D/N series or what have you. I would say ZipSlack would be ideal but that hd is really too small. I'm not sure what the minimum is, but I expanded mine just a little and it's something like 450 megs now.

Thanks for the reply digiot.

Ill do some more searching and then some testing.

So far Ive only used OO to edit MS Worksheets on my main PC, if installing X and OO is my only option to edit those worksheets, I guess I'm probably better of leaving win95 on this thing if I decide to use it.

As a side note I did read about a guy ripping his win95 install down to 5mb and still get it to boot and function, maby thats the way to go :-) .

In worst case scenario, I could always use it as a decoder to add some channels to my telly ;-) ,

Sure thing. Not very helpful, though, I'm afraid. That is what I was thinking - that you must be needing OpenOffice - but I wasn't sure if there wasn't something else. And OO is very heavy.

5 megs disk space or RAM usage? I know you can run DOS 7.0/7.1 stand-alone but to get a functional GUI in that - that's impressive.

And, yeah, it depends on your aims - you mentioned throwing it away but a box like that could have a lot of uses, if not as an Excel editor. Good luck.

Just to add a little about Basic Linux

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis...ions/baslinux/

BasicLinux is a mini-Linux that runs in a 4mb ramdisk. It has a fully-featured shell, an easy-to-use editor, and a variety of useful utilities. In particular, BasicLinux is well equipped for internet use: it can dial an ISP, browse the web, send/receive mail, and download files.
BasicLinux is a good distribution for an old 486. It is much leaner than RedHat and performs better on old hardware. Although BasicLinux initially runs on a ramdisk, it can be installed to its own HD partition, where additional packages can be added (including X and GCC).

An little update.

I found this distro while searching for something for my little lappy, Grey Cat Linux.

http://home.wanadoo.nl/peterdekoning/main.htm . Its a cross between basiclinux and slack3.5, some highlights from their site :

This version includes a GUI (X-free -SVGA+VGA16) and Icewm. Netscape 3, Netscape mail. xv, and more! It has also all features from GCL 2.x. Downloadsize is approx.12 megs.

Doing stuff in gui is no hassle at all , now if I only could find that Exel "converter" to go with it.


I also tried this one, Tiny Linux, http://tiny.seul.org/ .
This one got a little more stuff in it and was the one I wanted to have (still is) its based on slack4, and is a wooping 54mb download (floppy based) for a full system (GUI and all), but during install from floppys I would always get "bus error" or "dma timeout" before finishing and thus corrupting the install.

Anyways to other ppl out there having ancient hardware, try out those links and give it a read, it could be just what youre looking for