I have done this a couple of times on similar machines -- using Slackware instead of Debian -- but either should work.

But as a caveat: This is an emergency solution. For example, you absolutely have to have OpenOffice and you cannot afford more RAM or a more powerful machine.

And it can be done. But you are going to have to be prepared for it to run as slow as molasses in January.

That said, I would make two partitions on a Slackware box, and three on a Debian box. In each case, with 48 MB RAM, I would provide a minimum 150 MB for swap and plan on watching while it thrashes. It takes more RAM than you have to load X, a window manager, and OpenOffice, so you are just going to have to wait while it grinds away for several minutes, swapping like crazy.

In your situation, since you appear to have a second drive of 270 MB, I would use the entire drive for swap. 270 MB is more than you can use, but there isn't much you can do with the tiny partition that would be left over if you broke it into two partitions.

If I was loading Slackware, the entire 1.2 GB drive would be used as the / partition. With Debian, the 10 MB /boot, and the rest for /.

Then, if all I really wanted to do was run Open Office, I'd stick with one of the older window managers. FVWM, or maybe even TWM. I'd plan on starting Open Office from the command line in a terminal window.

Linux software is becoming badly bloated, and the minimum machine that will deliver halfway decent performance using Gnome or KDE and Open Office today is, in my opinion, something like a PII 333 MHz with 160~256 MB RAM.

Good luck. What you want to do can be done, but you will want to upgrade as soon as you can.

To your other questions:

df -h will show you disk space.

/dev/ttyx is a serial port. tty0 is "com 1." tty1 is "com 2," and so on.

Trio64 cards are often a problem, and here I can't help, because I don't use X on any of my Debian boxes.

i ll try it, even if it is slower than a dead snail.

perhaps with abiword, not with openoffice.

thanks for the commands.

Do this:
Slackware
Fluxbox
Abiword.

I have this (well, not Abiword yet) on a P166/32MB RAM, and it runs great.

which version of slackware do you have?

check out the distrowatch website. there are lot of useful info and mag reviews. I'm a newbie as well. I have a pent 200mx 64meg of ram. My favourites are Slax under fluxbox and Puppy. Then again you'll need to check out which one appeals to you, and is easy to use. Go for it!

Tried Damnsmalllinux 0.8 (3.01 is available now) and learnt a lot.
Its symple, small, doesnt much ram.
Good choice for the beginning on small computers.
In some days I ll give sarge a try on it (with fluxbox).

I would suggest using Slackware, don't use Gentoo on slow PC, it can take you a month to install it. For a graphical desktop use fluxbox.

On my own 120mhz Pentium with 48megs of RAM and 1.3gig hard drive, I use Debian 3.1 and IceWM rather than fluxbox.

I found the system to be faster with IceWM than fluxbox. Maybe this is because I use mostly GtK applications (like Firefox, AbiWord, GQView, Rox-filer, XMMS...). IceWM also uses GtK.

The way I partitioned things was to devote 1gig to /, and the rest to swap.

Did you install a base system first?
And added the window-manager afterwards?
Then how did you add the window-manager?
Did you use aptitude?
What would be an easy method?
I don't need any gdm and other session-manager
I only want to have X11 with fluxbox. It will be a single-user desktop.

Yes, I started with just the base system. I usually prefer to install the desktop workstation suite (it includes both KDE and GNOME), but that requires over 2 gigs of hard drive space.

I've never personally used aptitude, although people say you just use it like apt-get.

I don't really remember the exact steps I took. Installing "icewm" and "gdm" made it install a bunch of stuff, but not the actual base-xwindow-system (or whatever exactly it's called). I remember it wasn't very hard.

Anyway, with severely limited disk space it's important to run "apt-get clean" after you install stuff. This will clean out the cache of deb package files.

I'm too lazy to type in "startx", so I always use gdm or kdm. As long as you've got a swap file, the excess "crud" will just get swapped out to disc anyway.

Alright, sounds good!
Did you use a package management system?

I used the default "apt-get" Debian package management system. I know there are GUI front ends and also the "aptitude" alternative; but I've never used them since I'm comfortable enough with "apt-get".

The only apt command which really revolutionized my Debian experience was when I learned about "apt-cache search ...searchstring...". Before that, I had to figure out the exact name of a package to install it (usually by searching the Debian web site).

I haven*t heard of it yet.

Would this search for the name of the firefox package?

"apt-cache search foobar" will search for all packages with "foobar" in the name or description.

cool, I ll try it out