I have Woody installed on an IBM 340CSE laptop with a 486/50, 12MB of RAM,
and a 10GB drive. It currently boots, but hits swap the instant I start the
PCMCIA card services to bring up wireless networking; even a "ps axw" starts
grinding in single-user mode.
Now, I don't expect wonders from this little machine. I just want it up
enough to use as a thin X terminal with no programs running locally.
I've already built a new 2.4.21 kernel without initrd and with everything
non-vital removed. Is the 2.2.x series significantly smaller?
Can I reduce the hard drive cache? RAM is *much* more valuable to me than
buffered reads and writes.
Is Debian even reasonable on this tiny box, or should I be looking at a
slimmer distribution? If so, any suggestions?
Many thanks - I await running my 640x480x256-color Mozilla with bated
breath.