Small LaptopnForum: Laptops Topic: Small Laptopn started by: tripppy Posted by tripppy on April 27 2004,09:46
Hey my firend showed me his laptopn, it has a 160MB HD a com port a parrallel port, a pcmica slot and what looks like a DVI port. and a track ball!wat in terms of DSL can i do with it? nullmodem to it? i saw a post about you can use the printer port for networking? maybe i was dreaming. we dont wanna buy a pcmicia card but if needed we will! Posted by cbagger01 on April 27 2004,16:27
You can play with parallel port networking if you like (search google for 'plip').A 160MB hard drive is big enough to do a poor man's or frugal install of DSL and still leave you with about 100MB left over for a swap file and for storage space. Installing DSL on a laptop like that will most likely be a pain in the butt but you should eventually get it going. The big question to ask is: Do you have enough RAM? I wouldn't bother trying to run graphics on less than 16MB of RAM. A 16MB RAM system should work fine as long as you create, format, and active a swap file or swap partition on the hard drive. Just make sure to not run more than one program at a time or your hard disk will start working overtime with all of the memory swapping that is required. Good Luck. Posted by gekkokid on April 27 2004,19:13
tripppy check that ur pcmcia bridge thingy works with dsl, i have about 7 or 8 compatable cards sadly dsl for some reason doesnt work with my old presario
Posted by tripppy on April 27 2004,22:54
plip ok, ill check that at home before i go any further.If he is running less than 16mb should i stick to DOS? We want to use it as a sound recorder for jamming! We'll have to find a cheap sound card. Posted by cbagger01 on April 28 2004,02:15
If you have less than 16MB, you may be able to use DSL in text mode by typing "dsl 2" (version 0.6.3) or "knoppix 2" (older version) at the DSL F2 boot prompt.Another option would be to get a version of Linux that is designed to work with even less RAM than DSL, like low-resource Vector Linux or Basic Linux. Good Luck. Posted by AwPhuch on April 29 2004,14:18
I have a very old laptop with 16Megs of RAM running in graphical mode, and a 32Meg swap DIR, and its dual booted with Win 95, you must have a SWAP dir or file in order for it to be able to do much of anythingDont expect much out of DSL with only 16Megs of RAM, I use my laptop as a kind of WAP detector (airsnort rocks), but YMMV. Also if you boot fluxbox in enhanced mode but without desktop ICONS it helps alot...all those pretty pictures really eat up the RAM/SWAP really fast You can tell your DSL to boot directly enhanced without ICONS by modifying your /root/.xinitrc file and make it like this
Hope this helps Brian AwPhuch |