newbie seeks expert advice on special Slackware 10 project
 

I’m sorry for this long post I’m trying to provide as much detail as I can, if this much information offends I humbly beg your forgiveness. :(

Ok, I’ve gotten far with my project, after installing, and re-installing Slackware a number of times on this machine, I finally have a reasonable grip on how to actually make everything work. ( well for a total n00bie anyhow ) Now for the main event…

I’m installing Slack10 on this small minimalist Toshiba Portege 3110 Laptop.
The machine Specs are:
· Pentium II mobile 300 Mhz
· 128 Mb ram
· 6.4 Gig HD
· Trident Cyber9525 Vid chip ( PCI no AGP display )
· ESS 1978 Audio Chip
· eepro100 Net adapter ( also will use a Ximcom PCMCIA adapter )
· 800 x 600 LCD screen
· PCIv2.1 bus ( no ISA )
· APMv1.0, PnPv1.0a, VESAv2.0, DPMS, DDC2b, PCI BIOS
· Winmodem
· Teac PCMCIA – IDE/ATAPI CD-Rom ( haven’t been able to make this work yet. :confused

My goal for this project is to turn this old, but cool, laptop into my own demented version of a PDA/MP3 Player/Portable browser type thing.

My intent is to run the following:
· XCFE desktop
· Mozilla ( firefox?)
· A good e-mail client for Earthlink mail
· MP3 Player ( xmms? )
· Calendar ( built into XCFE )
· GIMP
· Gnutella
· A good phone number/address/e-mail address app to keep track of all the fine ladies =P
· GAIM
· Abiword

I’m looking to eliminate from this install everything that I won’t need both in terms of packages during the install and, eventually, from the kernel itself. This will both make this older machine perform better, and satisfy my obsessive-compulsive desire for this laptop to be as lean and mean as possible.

The 3110 will never have a printer connected to it, it has no ISA bus, and it will never have a SCSI card. I have no need to play with the IR port. It will never have AGP display capability.

The first hurdle I have to clear is installing all the packages I need to use the above items and perform the essential system functions, yet trim off any other stuff ( even if it’s cool ) that’s not needed for this machine.

Is there any reason to install any of the following?


cpio-2.5-i386-1
cups-1.1.20-i486-1 – no printer attached, safe to exclude?
gawk-3.1.3-i486-1 – is this important for this install?
genpower-1.0.3-i486-1 – (no UPS)
isapnptools-1.26-i386-1 – no ISA bus on the 3110
jfsutils-1.1.6-i486-1
logrotate-3.6.8-i486-1
lprng-3.8.27-i486-1
minicom-2.00.0-i386-1 – will I need this to dial up my ISP for a PPP connection? ( when not using the LAN to connect )
slocate-2.7-i486-3 – I have no idea if this is needed by the system
smartmontools-5.30-i486-1
tcsh-6.13.00-i486-1 – any reason for a shell besides bash for this machine?
a2ps-4.13b-i386-2
amp-0.7.6-i386-1 – is this required to run X players like xmms ?
apsfilter-7.2.5-i386-2
ash-0.4.0-i386-1
bc-1.06-i386-2
bpe-2.01.00-i486-1
enscript-1.6.3-i386-1
espgs-7.07.1-i486-2
ispell-3.2.06-i386-1 – needed to run abiword?
jed-0.99_16-i486-1
joe-3.1-i486-1
jove-4.16.0.61-i386-1
ksh93-20030724-i486-1 – again is this shell really needed ?
lvm-1.0.8-i486-1 – needed if your only using 1 HD ?
mysql-4.0.20-i486-1
sudo-1.6.6-i386-1
vim-6.3.007-i486-1 – do I need this if I already have elvis ?
zsh-4.2.0-i486-1
clisp-2.33.2-i486-1
perl-5.8.5-i486-2 - is perl required to run the software I’ve listed above?
python-2.3.4-i486-1 - is python required to run the software I’ve listed above?
elm-2.5.7-i486-1 - do I need this if I’m using pine?
mutt-1.4.2.1i-i486-1 – see above
nail-11.3-i486-1 – same
tetex-2.0.2-i386-1 – is there any reason I need TeX ?

Do I need blackbox, fluxbox or any other window managers to run XCFE 4 ?

Can you think of anything else I can eliminate?

Do I need The Netscape package to run Mozilla or Firefox?

If I install Firefox can I un-install mozilla to prevent redundancy?

Can you suggest anything else that I can discard from the install?

After I get the install packages running lean-and-mean I’m going to try to compile a custom Kernel. The kernel version that comes with this ISO is 2.4.26. However I’ve seen that version 2.6.8.1 includes several fixes that might apply to me such as a fix for trident vid chips and some kind of native Trident acceleration.

Is it better to stay with 2.4.26 and just recompile to take out such things as ACPI, SCSI and ISA bus and set the processor to Pentium 2, and disable AGP etc?

If it will pay to upgrade to the 2.6.8.1 how can I upgrade essential things like the GCC compiler Etc. as described in the “ Changes” document that’s included with the kernel source?
( remember I’m a newb, I don’t even know where to go to download this stuff, or how to properly unpack it, unless a doc file is included )

Can you think of other attributes that I should enable/disable for this hardware>? (Intel BX chipset btw)

I thank you in advance for your help with this project and for you patience with such a long and detailed post.

:(

Im not a expert on slackware 10 preferring slack 9.1 still but I have installed it on several computers.
i can hardly tell any diffrence between mozilla and firefox but you can remove the mozilla package later if you like the firefox

thunderbird is a great email client *personal choice(
you wont need cups if you wont attach a printer
I would get both perl and python
wont need mysql
i would recommend sudo because its alot easier and safer than using su
you dont need any other windows manager to run xfce4
dont need the netscape package
I would stick with the 2.4.26 and reconfig it turning alot of stuff off and removing alot of the modules you know you wont use.
as far as the rest its hard to tell if you will need it later in the future or not but thats whats so great about installpkg. Just get it later when you know you need it.

You should keep cpio, gawk, andperl. cpio is used by pkgtool, gawk is used dueing init scripts, perl is needed to compile kernel. Python you may need also.
Of course you can leave out all of emacs, tkl, docs.
See my minimal install HOWTO's for more info.