I have an old panasonic cf 41, affectionately known as "the breeze block". It has a p75 processor, 16mb ram, and a 770mb hard disk. It is used as a basic office machine at home and at work, and works fine- boots up from scratch and opens a 40 page word document in 98 seconds.

It also has a working floppy disk, and a cd rom drive, but the cd rom is not bootable without a startup floppy such as the win 98 rescue disk that has a cd driver and sets up a ram disk.

I run win 95, ms office 97 pro, and word 2000 on this, and with a bit of juggling I have got this down to under 300mb installed.

I have partitioned the drive to leave 370 mb for this windows installation, 20 mb for "my documents" in a seperate partition, leaving me with about 370mb to play with for linux. I have set up a 330mb ext2 partition, and 32 mb swap space using partition magic, and I need some advice about which Linux distribution and office suite to drop into this to give me at least as much functionality as my current set up.

I have tried SUSE so far and it will not even look at this system- many wasted hours extracting boot disks wrecking the system and formatting and reloading....much fun :-(

What I want to do is run my existing system and a linux based system head to head in a real work setting for six months.(By which time I will have saved up enough money to buy myself an ibook unless I am impressed by what I see!)

Does this seem like a fair challenge? I would welcome any advice on type of system to install, and how to do it.

I am not a complete newcomer to computers, I used to programme commodore pets in my distant youth, but I am new to linux, I don't know the sytax or understand non dos based file systems. I am however willing to learn and will put the hours in if it will help me to see what the truth is behind the great operating system debate.

This page has 2 entries for the cf-41. It looks as though Slackware would be a good choice for this model.

And welcome to LQ.

Thanks for checking that up. I have looked at those two pages already, and bookmarked them for reference. I needed them to get my win setup back after suse wrecked it and left half of grub in the mbr :-(.
I have given up on suse for now, fine for more modern machines, but I need something a lot smaller that I can load from a floppy or two and then add to when the cd rom is up and running.