cecil wrote:
Setting up power management, I can read up on it.
Your mainboard's BIOS may or may not support ACPI, and may or may not be buggy. You might need to use APM, and you might only get partial or minimal support. Search the 'net for "Linux" + [your laptop make and model].
The memory, that too can be worked around. But does anyone know how much space the "base" install for debian takes up?
I installed woody on a 486 laptop (8MB RAM) on Friday. Well, actually I took the hard drive out and imaged it on another machine, but anyhow... I'd have to look to be sure, but it was at ~88MB. It's a work in progress, and probably will end up with a source based distro on it (compiled on another machine).
I'll probably install mozilla, xmms, and gnome, unless its too big. Some sort of simple office suite also, I guess.
Disk footprint isn't the issue here: RAM is. But it will run. Perhaps someone can recommend a browser optimized for embedded/handheld devices. You might try one of the old Netscape Navigator/Communicator binaries. I believe they are available in the Debian contrib repository. There is also Dillo [1], which has an official Debian package as well. I'd like to know too for my 486 laptop.
But I for one am doubtful OOo will even run in 32MB RAM. Have you considered EMACS or VI, and LaTeX?
Hey, it only cost me 71 bucks for it; it's hard to beat that for a school computer.
That is awesome for a functioning laptop. [1] http://www.dillo.org dircha