Debian on a Super Lean Laptop Part I - Making it Work
This may, at first glance, appear to be an exercise into insanity, but it is a rather important little project to me.
I have this old Toshiba Satellite laptop (P-120, 6GB had drive, and a whoppong 24MB RAM) that is currently running 98SE Lite. It runs adequately on Windows, but now I would like to make it dual boot with Debian. Specifically, I want to mostly use it as a thin client to connect to a more heavy duty Debian box so I can use apps like Firefox, OpenOffice, VLC, etc from anywhere within range of my wireless router.
To prep the drive, I put it in one of my build boxes and fired up gparted (to make the ext3 and swap partitions) and then ran partimage to put a saved bare bones network capable base install on the new partition.
The build box boots the bare bones build beautifully. However, the laptop hangs when I try to boot into Linux. Specifically, the last thing shown on the screen before nothing else happens is:
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-3-486
[Linux-initrd @ 0x10b3000, 0x76cdf9 bytes]
After that, she's locked up tight, and all I can do is power off.
This is obviously a problem with initrd. Set too large for such a low memory system perhaps? If so, what can be done to fix this?
I know that there are distros specifically geared toward bare bones systems (like Vectorlinux for example), but really, as far as I can tell, this build is already stripped down to almost nothing (Midnight Commander, elinks, sudo, and samba). Vector looks appealing, but it is Slackware based, and I would really really really prefer to keep all my systems Debian oriented.
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