Hi folks,

I thought you could help me with this (sh..t) task: I got a 486 notebook these days and wanted to install a rudimentary linux on it, to use it as a printserver and for HostAP with a Prism Card.

Specifications:

-CPU: 486 66 MHz
-Ram: 12 MB
-HDD: 500 MB
-well, no CD-Rom, but I´ve got an external one, with PCMCIA.
-normal FDD.

So my first question is: Which distribution should I take for this?

And my second: How can I install Linux on this Notebook, e.g. with the external PCMCIA?

I would say that it won't matter too much what distro you install on this system since the hardware is pretty old. You are going to be doing a minimal installation on the system anyway since it only has a 500mb hdd.

If you really want to try a minimal-by-nature or highly cutomizable distro, you may want to try LFS (Linux From Scratch http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/) depending on how comfortable you feel with that. I've seen another micro distro called Damn Small Linux http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/. This is, of course, if you want to save space etc. It may be more headache than it's worth if you are fairly new.

As far as booting from the CDROM, is there an option in the BIOS to let you boot from CD or the PCMCIA in some manner?

If not, you may went to check out http://www.linux-laptop.net and look up your manufacturer and model to see what others have done.

- Javahead2000

I was just reading over your post, it sounds like i am in a very similar situation.

I choose slackware - zipslack install. only 40Mb download.

But i am having heaps of problem with the hostAP side... It has taken me days to get all the extra packages installed so i can do a compile.

No, i am getting gcc errors of "out of memory".... Arhhhhhh


Let me know how you went, might be able to share configs.