Hi everybody,

I just picked up a Toshiba laptop in the garbage (call me a garbage picker, but hey, a laptop is a laptop ... and no... no incirminating evidence on the HDD). It's a Toshiba Satellite 440CDX and here are the specs (at least that I know of... already checked Toshiba's website on this one to confirm):
P1-133MHz
32MB RAM
2MB Vid card (?? not sure about this one) (Chips Technologies 65554PCI)
1.2GB HDD
CD-ROM (no floppy drive),
Xircom 33.6 "CreditCard Ethernet-Modem" PCMCIA card.
no battery but I got the cable for it and it runs too!!.

Hehehe.. Just finished checking the BIOS, it seems to support "boot from CDROM"I want to install Linux on this machine, I know I won't be able to run KDE3.1 on this but if I can squeeze in some room on this puppy then maybe I can get X to work (yes? no?).

Any suggestions as to which distro I should put on this 'puter... and why?

Thanks for the suggestions. Oooo this is gonna be a nice "linux learning" toy for me.

(BTW, I already have SuSE8.2 and RedHat 9 on CD's)...

//Canon

www.linux-laptop.net
There's one about a Toshiba 460DX, I don't know if that's close to the 440CDX ... and I can't get the page to open, so maybe just have a look at it?

I'd go for slackware, or some small distro that doesn't require heavy hardware ...

Done some google-ing and came up with this:
some thead about this particular toshiba
hope that's a helpful one, didn't really read through the whole thing.

I think it will come down to settle for a windowmanager like fluxbox, that uses little resources... 32mb ram isn't really a lot

Yeah it's kinda old-ish, but hey, it's free. Still, even though it's not zippy, I hope to get something on there that would do the trick and give me an opportunity to use Linux on it. Don't think I'd buy additional ram for this either - just checking some prices on the net and ...

... How much space would a slackware install cost me? it's only a 1.2GB drive.

Do an expert install, and select only the packages you'll be using ... you'll manage to save a lot of space I think ...

# 386 processor
# 16MB RAM
# 50 megabytes of hard disk space
# 3.5" floppy drive

those are the minimum requirements I took from www.slackware.com ... of course that will probably be the basic OS, you might want more packages than that

http://www.slackware.com/pb/
there you can have a look at the different packages you can choose from, maybe already make a selection of what you need and don't need ...

(btw there are smaller distro's too that might run on your laptop, check distrowatch )

hmmm.. One problem.. I don't have a 3.5 floppy drive. the 'puter I found only has a CDROM (I checked in the BIOS and it's possible to boot from CD).

BTW, is there any benefit/drawback to/of the various interfaces ( EMACS-based etc...)? I'm looking at retaining system performance mainly - well as much of it as I can muster and keep from that laptop..

**EDIT
scratch the floppy comment.. ISO slackware boots off a cd. doh!

if you use emacs, you might want to keep it ... it's an ok editor, and I don't think it takes up much space (not sure about it, but sure doesn't look like it does) ... if you haven't used it, you can skip it ... you can always code in vi

also have a look at whether you want KDE and GNOME and the applications they deliver ... those two are the real memory eating tools, but they come with some nice applications (which can be replaced by others, I'm sure)