--- Begin Message ---
- To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
- Subject: Solved! GUI desktop on ultra-slim laptop
- From: Kirk Strauser <kirk@strauser.com>
- Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 17:04:08 -0500
- Message-id: <87k799wbhj.fsf@pooh.honeypot.net>
--- End Message ---
I was given an old IBM ThinkPad 340CSE with a 486/50 and 12MB of RAM. I
replaced the dead 200MB harddrive with a 10GB model that I pulled from a
hacked Webplayer. My goal was to use the little machine for web browsing,
email checking, etc. from about the house. Today, I succeeded. Here's what
I did:
1) Bought a Microsoft MN-500 WAP and MN-520 wlan card (Prism) from Office
Max for a total of $80.
2) Built a 2.2.25 kernel with *everything* not strictly required for booting
stripped away, but with pcmcia-cs and linux-wlan-ng modules added in. A
gigahertz-class Thunderbird was very convenient for this step.
3) apt-get remove'd everything that didn't look absolutely necessary. I
mean, *everything*. `ps aux' at login returns:
init
[kflushd
[kupdate
[kswapd
[keventd
/sbin/klogd
/sbin/cardmgr
-bash
/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
/sbin/getty 38400 tty3
4) Set a few sysctls for minimal caching:
vm/buffermem = 0 0 5
vm/page-cluster = 1
vm/pagecache = 0 0 5
vm/pagetable_cache = 0 0
4) Installed and configured svgalibg1. The defaults were almost reasonable,
except that I set the video card to "VESA" and turned off mouse
acceleration.
5) Installed svncviewer.
6) Set up a VNC server (-geometry 640x480 -depth 8) on a larger host on the
LAN.
7) Booted into multi-user mode, launched svncviewer, and started using
Konquerer and OpenOffice.org on my little underpowered laptop.
--
Kirk Strauser
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