Low-end distribution reccomendation
 

I recently got my hands on an extremely novel old Toshiba "portable", the T5200/100. It's got 6MB RAM, a 100MB HD, a 486DX and an EISA NIC, and I thought it would make a great ssh terminal if I put Linux on it. It won't boot from most standard Linux boot disks, though, because it won't read superformatted floppies (It gets I/O errors after it tries to read past the 1440 boundry). Can anyone reccomend a low-end distribution I could install or at least bootstrap from conventionally formatted 1.44M diskettes?

I don't know for sure. Try distrowatch; check out the descritpions for the distros. Maybe something like DamnSmallLinux?

DamnSmall, Peanut, Puppy, Slack or Debian should do the trick for you.

Most of the distros mentioned include X-windows. I think X-windows would be a pretty painful experience in 6Mb of RAM.

Pocket Linux http://www.pocket-lnx.org/ is supposed to do exactly what you want - boot off a single floppy as a ssh terminal.

I'm a bit worried about that NIC you have tho'. Wonder what driver it needs?

Excellent...Pocket-Linux was exactly what I needed. Inconvienent that it doesn't have DHCP, but it's easy enough to script in a manual configuration, and it picked up my NE2000 compatible PnP EISA NIC without a problem.

I may toy later with getting it to boot directly from the HD.