[wplug] Distro selection assistance

[Nathan Marcus]

I have an old Sony Vaio (IIRC 505tx) with a pentium 1 ( sub 300 mhz,
and about 64 mb of lord-knows-what RAM) on it, and I tried several
linux distros and they didnt work.  I tried slackware, suse, fedora
core, mepis, and gentoo (lol).

I must say that I dont know if your vaio has an integrated CD drive,
but mine didn't, nor even a floppy drive.  Those were "attachments."

I bought an aftermarket ethernet card to pop into the PCMCIA slot, and
decided on using
FreeBSD in the end, and it worked like a charm.  Booted via a cd, then
the rest by network.  I used xfce as the desktop environment, and
recompiled a no-bloat kernel and it is one zippy little laptop that I
like to carry around when I need to fix/diagnose problems on networks.

With an aftermarket battery, the longer lifetime can make this the
best notes machine ever on Abiword in xfce.  (pico or nano are even
better if you REALLY need battery time)

Hope you consider it an option.

On 2/17/06, Eric Cooper <ecc at cmu.edu> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 10:05:03AM -0500, David Harper wrote:
> > I am trying to install a light weight version of linux on a Sony VAIO N505VE
> >
> > Celeron 333MHz
> > 64 MB SDRAM
> > 6 GB HD
> > One PCMCIA slot (used for CD drive - no internal CD drive)
> > Floppy
> > 3Com 3CCFE575BT-D (PCMCIA 10/100)
>
> Your main limitation is RAM, not CPU or disk space.  If you have empty
> slots, consider expanding the memory -- it should be dirt cheap.
>
> A full Gnome environment runs only slightly sluggishly on my old 233
> MHz laptop, but it has about 256M of memory.  On the other hand, I've
> just set up an Xbox to run MythtV (frontend, X server, ssh server and
> that's about it).  It has a 733 MHz CPU, but only 64M of RAM.
> Anything that makes it swap is unbearable.
>
> Debian (or Ubuntu) makes it easy to customize for these kinds of
> environments.
>
> --
> Eric Cooper             e c c @ c m u . e d u
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