Old Laptop Distro???

[Michael Hipp]

Alma J Wetzker wrote:
> I listen avidly to the new distro's that abound.  I have a question:
> 
> I have an old compaq armada (4131T) with 80 MB of RAM and a 4 GB drive.  
> It will not boot from the CD.  I want to set it up to X into a faster 
> machine. What distro should I put on it?
> 
> I gather that I need to, at least, start with a 2.4 kernel (2.6 will not 
> fit on a floppy.)  It runs 802.11B and needs to pickup that card.  It 
> does not have cardbus but the old PCMCIA 16-bit slot.  There are no USB 
> connections.
> 
> I was thinking of slack but is there a better way?  All I really need it 
> to be is an X-terminal.
> 
> (A suggestion or two on HOW to get it done would be helpful also.)

Of the modern, quality distros of my acquaintance, the one that I think of as 
running well on modest hardware is Libranet.

Debian seems to lend itself well to slimmed-down installs. It also supports 
booting from floppies:

http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch-install-methods.en.html#s-create-floppy
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch-rescue-boot.en.html#s-boot-from-floppies

Debian stable with 2.4 kernel would probably do the job.

Michael