Challenge - Getting Debian Working on a Pair of Real Old Laptops
I have a pair of old P-I based Toshiba Laptops (Satellite Pro 425CDT and
Portege 650CT), and I am trying to figure out how to get a working
Debian installation on them. These laptops are very light on RAM. The
Satellite has 40MB (which I believe is the most she can take), and the
Portege has 24MB (can take up to 80MB).
Both of them have successfully run Windows 98SE, so I figure they should
be able to run an ultra lightweight Debian desktop as well. For the
local desktop setup, which will just be mostly for maintenance purposes,
I am wanting to use LXDE as my desktop environment with the only
additional X-based apps installed being XMMS (these have decent on board
sound, so it would be a shame to let it go to waste), and Dillo, for
basic graphical web browsing.
The primary use for these two laptops however, will be as thin clients
which would connect to another more fully featured Debian system via
XDMCP. For this, I will use GDM, since none of the other login managers
I have tried have any easy way to select remote login as a session.
So anyway, I have run a test install, by first doing a minimal net
install of Stable on my "build box" and upgrading to Sid. After
transferring the drive from the build box to one of the laptops, I was
greeted with a kernel panic (same with when I tried it in the other
laptop). I don't recall what the actual full error messages were, but
apparently, neither 24MB or 40MB are sufficient to run a bare bones
console only implementation of Debian?
I am guessing that these laptops can't use a 2.6 kernel, since I tried
Damn Small Linux (which uses 2.4) on them just to see if I could get a
working desktop, and was able to run Fluxbox and get on the Web with
Dillo.
So now that I know that these laptops can boot up into functional Linux
systems, are there any suggestions I might try to get a proper "pure"
Debian setup on them? I don't want to go with DSL, because there are
just too many annoying little details to configure manually. Come to
think of it, I don't really want to go with any live distro.
Suggestions? Pointers? Tips?
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