[plug] What distro for old laptop?

[Cameron Patrick]

Kirk Turner wrote:

> > I have an Acer laptop purchased new in '98 which only has 32MB ram and nil 
> > prospect of getting more.  Will any recent distro work, or do I have to 
> > dredge up RH 7.0 or some such?  The ones I have tried using kernel 2.4.? 
> > work, but spend most of the time thrashing.
> I have a P120 with 32MB RAM (thanks Computer Angels) running Debian Woody.
> Admittedly it is better not to run X, but even so it runs well enough.

If you run something /really/ lightweight (like fvwm or ratpoison or
maybe even {black,flux,open}box) then you should be alright under X.
Stick to using little web browsers (e.g. w3m, links, dillo); little
mail clients (e.g. mutt, sylpheed); little editors (vim, not emacs :-P)
and using the command line (or even "mc" Midnight Commander which
is a clone of Norton Commander for DOS) for file management.  Don't
know what (if any) Open Office-equivalents would work on that kind of
hardware.  Abiword and Gnumeric?

Cameron.