Hi!
I recently made a post to linuxforums {dot} org with a similar question, mistaking that forum for this one (bad memory on my part). Now that I found the REAL forum, maybe now I can get some good answers.

I recently bought a Thinkpad 701cs (the one with the folding keyboard), which I hope to use for text input/ impressing girls. It is a 486 DX4-75 with 16mb ram and 720mb harddisk space. To do this, I will be installing Linux.

The question is: which distro, and more importantly, what version?

I am thinking either Slack 7.1 or Debian Woody (or possibly even DeLi linux, but I'd prefer to stay more mainstream). I have tried later versions (what the other guys recommended) in vmware with 16 mb ram and 700mb disk, and things were not great. For speed, I'm thinking I should use gcc <=2.95, and generally old versions of stuff to save diskspace. I'm willing to trade new features in individual programs for a more complete set of programs.

I also want to display graphics, especially pdf, dvi and djvu files. Is there a way to do this nicely with the amount of ram I have? (x windows might be too much for it <?> )

Slack, even 10.2, will run on it but with that little RAM performance is going to be pretty poor no matter what distro you go with. Graphics will be problematic at best. Perhaps Links web browser in graphics mode may be the best you can do.

Either that or DSL or Puppy.

you could try any number of distros like debian, arch, slack as long as you use a very minimal window manager like ion, ratpoison or wmii my personal favorite. Plus all those ion/wmii/ratpoison keyboard shortcuts are bound to impress.

Well, arch is right out, since it is compiled for i686.
But those are cool window managers! I knew about ratpoison before, but I will definitely experiment with the others! But are they that much lighter weight than say, blackbox? Sure, with ratpoison, I would impress, but would it really be worth it if I didn't get to fiddle with the nipple? (by that I mean the trackpoint, of course)

But I'd really like to know if gcc 2.95 is really faster/ lighter weight than the 3 series, and the same for older versions of XFree86.

Google shows that you can bump the ram to 40 mb, install a 133 megahertz motherboard and a 2-4 gig hd. Then you could dual boot win95 with OS/2 WARP. Buy a PCMCIA cd and run Knoppix and you could read/write files to the fat 32 partition.

or I could just buy a Dell 19" laptop with 2 gigs ram and dual boot Windows Vista and OSx86.

But where would the fun be in that?

Or you could get a dual processor UltraSPARC laptop with 16 megs of ram and build OpenSolarus on it. Now that would be cool! Seriously, your little laptop was a very nice piece of engineering in its day. No matter what you put on it bumping the ram to 40 will help.

Oops, meant 16 Gigs of ram. Just can't convince the boss I need a $20,000 laptop!

Hey, I think debian would be a good choice. Maybe even debian testing. Other stuff which might be good is slackware or freebsd if you want to stay in a quite big distro. DSL is also quite good.

For X you could use tiny x , that's the one DSL uses. Or try the Xfree 4.3 first? using VESA?


I run debian testing on my 166mhz, 64mb ram, 1.5 GB. And use it as my main box. It's really good to work with after I found all kind of nice light apps.
Some nice window managers are ion3, wmii, ratpoison like mentioned before.
And if you decide to work without X you could run screen which is terrific!

For browsing the net I would use elinks. Something graphical could be links2 -g or dillo.

email: mutt-ng
music: cplay+madplay+ogg123 OR mp3blaster

etc

While I play mp3's, browse the web, chat, edit my website I mostly only use 30% of my cpu of 166mhz and about 32MB ram. I realize you have a much less computer but I saw an article about someone running debian testing on a pentium 75mhz with 16mb ram who played music, dowloaded with emule, browsed the web graphically in X all simoultanously:
http://www.pycs.net/lateral/stories/4.html


Have a look on my page about debian: http://users.skynet.be/six/gpure/tech/linux/debian.html

and my page about light apps:
http://users.skynet.be/six/gpure/tech/linux/apps.html


greetings,
gunnix

Great work gunnix.

Yes, thank you, Gunnix.
I haven't tried it yet, because without any extrenal drives, it is hard to install linux on there.
I am going to hook the laptop's hd to my PIII desktop using a converter & will install Sarge using the cdrom drive & network.
Are there any caviates to doing this? (like fry my mb cause the drive is too old, or get the wrong configuration because of hardware detection.....)

Slightly off-topic, but I noticed that nobody mentioned icewm as a decent, lightweight window manager. Does nobody use ice anymore?

@rookworm: no I don't believe it can harm your mobo in any way.
have luck with debian

by the way: I've been using FreeBSD for a week now and I must say I'm impressed. It's a very nice os. It starts quite a lot faster then debian (even if it's optimized here), the sound drivers are better then anything in linux, it has also many packages available like debian. I think it runs a bit faster overall. I gonna try it on my old box one of these weeks and see if it goes better on old boxes too. I hear it should be even better then debian for low machines, but that all depends on how doable it is to use binary packages only because on my newer machine I just compile everything. Which goes fast because I don't have any big programs .

It's mentioned on my webpage where I linked too. But in fact icewm never impressed me much like other light wm's did. These days I'm going from ion3 to wmii-2 and waw wmii-2 really rox! And from what I hear wmii-3 is going to be even better

grtz

gunnix

It's Alive!!!! (well, almost)...
I've got the sarge base install running, now I need to get my PCMCIA ethernet card working to use apt.... see this thread (for anyone interested in my continuing odessey....). Once that's done, I will implement gunnix's suggestions & post my perfect configuration for all to enjoy.

Cheers!

Hey great it is up!

And about icewm (from earlier), I think it is really great for windows users (with silverxp theme!). As I just installed it on a friends old computer and the only way they can use it is if it looks like windows

the link you posted doesn't work here though.

grtz