Greetings

I have recently been given an old Toshiba Satellite 200CS/810 notebook. It has less than 1 Gb HDD (is actually 770MB), carries 16MB EDO DRAM, and runs a Pentium 100Mhz. Having done some searching around, I found someone had managed to squeeze Vector Linux on to something like this, so I was just wondering what other distros would work on such a small machine. I would prefer X windows if possible - I enjoy Xfce which has a small footprint - and would be wanting to use it as an "experimental" machine to practice different routines that I wouldn't want to do on my workstation.
In terms of distros, I was wondering whether I could use a stripped down Slackware (the a package group for example), but I don't know how large that would come in at. I was also wondering if this wouldn't be a good opportunity to play around with a BSD system, but again don't know if any of those are small enough.

Any thoughts?

I heard "Damn Small Linux" is good for older computers.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/


ill hope this helps

Thanks for this. I'll put that on my list to explore. It looks like the CD-ROM on the Toshiba is non-bootable and it would seem that there are some work arounds for this with DSL, so it may not be such a bad choice

As for the window manager, you may want to use something even smaller, like Matchbox, or Twm, or something yet smaller.
Besides, if you use X, then don't use XFree with 16MB ram. I have 32MB and really, it's the strict minimum for XFree. So use TinyX instead (I've heard it's called kdrive now, which unfortunately (google-wise) conflicts with the name of an existing KDE program...)

Yves.

Moved: This thread is more suitable in Linux - Distributions and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.