Chris Frederick wrote: > I may be getting a new (and I use that term loosely) laptop. It's a > pentium (unknown mhz) with 16M ram, 500M hard drive, and built in > floppy. It has Win95 installed right now and I was wondering if it > would work as an X client connecting to a remote X server through wifi > (802.11b or g if it can handle that). Or is this too slow? And are > there any recommendations on distros that would load easily on this? I have and older 486/75 Thinkpad with 20M ram, 810M hard drive that runs Debian stable just fine. I had to use the XFree86 server from the 3.3 series instead of 4.1 but otherwise it was pretty easy to setup. Doing debian updates (apt-get update) is a slow process on the 486 but once it's done performance is pretty acceptable. The bigger X-window apps (eg, Netscape, mozilla, gimp, etc...) are ok but only if you run them from a remote server. I think I tried starting mozilla locally once and it took like 10 minutes just to load and then was horribly unusable. I've used dillo for basic browsing (eg, googling) and that was ok, but don't expect to be able to do online banking/shopping from it. Check your PCMCIA slots before you buy the wireless card to see if they are 16-bit (PCCARD) or 32-bit (Cardbus). You should be able to get this info from the laptop manufacturer's website or google for it. Slackware is another distro that would work really well and is easier to trim down for the limited space. Start by installing the A and N disks and then adding what you need once the system is up and running. Both Debian and Slackware can be installed from floppy disks (at least enough to get the base os running so you can install the rest from the network). -- scot _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list