just thought i'd share a positive experience with you about linux and an old laptop.

well, about a year ago i got this really old laptop (from 1996) given to me as a present. i hadn't done much with it, because i couldn't install anything on it (it doesn't boot from cd). somebody had at some stage tried to install windows 98 on it, but that was too much for it (we're talking really old and weak).

anyway, i removed the hard-drive and put damnsmalllinux on it, and it works great i can even use my wlan net with it (i'd bought a linux compatible pcmcia card for my other laptop at some stage). and it's really cool i now use it to remote desktop into my 64-bit machine when visiting people, so i can show off what a modern linux system looks like (pity it only shows 640x480...)

just thought i'd mention that

now i've installed gcc, a samba server and an apache server on it too.

pentium with mmx 133Mhz
32MB RAM (of which i think 2 are for the graphics)
really old and broken...

wlan, rdesktop and vnc capable with firefox, abiword (for odt files) etc. etc. etc.

I used a pentium 100 laptop with no CD-ROM on it for years. After replacing the hard disk on it for the 4th time, I finally retired it. It made a great Linux server. The last hard drive I had on it was a 20Gig. That was good enough for a print server of which 3 computers printed to (Windows and Linux computers) and so of course it ran Samba, as well as Apache Webserver, mail, Tomcat for server side Java, file server, etc. It was fabuluous because it had built in battery back up, never went down, it was small so I just tucked it away and never opened the lid. I had many remote users on it for file swapping. I used Slackware for the distro.

There is still much that can be done on Linux for almost nothing!

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