Hi~

I just found on old Toshiba T1960CS/200 laptop, and it only has a 200 mb hard drive, and I'm assuming that's far too small to do an installation with X. Toshiba's website was really un-helpful, and I was wondering if anyone here knew what hard-drives I could replace the 200mb one with.
I just want to put a pretty bare BSD installation on it so I can take notes and maybe even do a little coding when I'm on trips, so I really don't need a huge hard drive.

I have slackware 8.0 installed on a notebook(Compaq Contura 400cx) with a dx2/40, a 256mb drive and 28mb of ram, about 20mb of of the drive is swap, there's about 20% of the drive free. XFree (3.3.x) is running and I have to use twm as window manager if I am to run one locally. KDE 2.2 and IceWM run remotely are fine, so I imagine any other WM run remotely would too. A 100tx network is a must for this, 10 won't do.

From what I could find out, your notebook has the same processor, 20mb ram, and as you said a 200mb drive, so you're likely see a more swapping. Unlike me, you also appear to have a cd drive which should relieve you of having to jump through hoops like I did just to get an install.

While I apologize that this isn't a direct response listing what drives might be compatible with your notebook, I feel I should warn you: I have found that (especially with X running) that the real limiting factor of this notebook is not the drivespace, but rather the processor speed and the small amount of ram. I am only able to run X applications like Opera, Konqueror, Mozilla, Phoenix(now Firebird), kmail, etc, at an acceptible speed remotely, eg: on a more powerful machine on my network. Run locally, even the most minor application spawns swapping so severe that I would consider it unusable. Just a terminal window seems to be ok, but then if that's all you're using, running X is probably a waste of resources. Regular console stuff like Midnight Commander run fine.

You may want to reconsider spending money on upgrading the drive, at least until after you get something installed on it and try running X.

One more thing I had forgotten, assuming you can give up a pcmcia slot, you can easily more than double your "disk" space on that machine probably much more cheaply than buying a new drive by purchasing a compact flash card pcmcia adapter (mine was 19.95) and a 256mb compact flash card (about 50 bux), I have done this and it does work nicely, it's a rather slow drive, but it works, you could mount /usr or /usr/local on it. If you need help setting it up let me know.

Thanks~

I'll look in to that flash card idea. All I'll be using the laptop for is vi, so this may actually work!

Unfortunately, this laptop doesnt' have a cd drive. I was wondering if I could stream the data from a pc with a cdrom through a serial port or something. If this isn't possible, I could look into a fast PCMCIA ethernet adapter if I had to.

Thanks,
Andrew

Yes, I would say if vi is your main app, those resources are fine. Getting something installed without a cd drive will probably be the biggest obstacle to overcome. You'll definitely need a fast ethernet card, and another box on your network to install from, but be careful, for instance on the contura, no 32bit cardbus cards will go into the slots, only 16bit pcmcia cards will work, I'm using a Linksys PCM100 for wired access and for wireless, a belkin F5D6020 (atmel chipset).

The contura was given to me with Win3.1 on it, which I promptly wiped and began my adventures in Slackware installation.
I had to first install SmallLinux, which is a 2-floppy "distro" using an older linux kernel and libraries, from which I prepared the rest of the drive for an NFS install of Slackware 8.0, which was initiated via floppy. I downloaded the entire installation directory of Slack8 via ftp to another machine on my network (which has big drives) and installed using it as my source. Additionally, I had to compile a custom, really stripped down kernel for it (on a different machine, the dx2/40 would have taken weeks...heh) to conserve every bit of ram I could because initially I only had 4mb in the contura, later, after the install, I got 24mb more off of Ebay for a song, which, after a bios upgrade finally got recognized in-full. In the end it works quite nicely for a "free" laptop, but it took quite a while to put together. Incidentally, I compiled the "new" kernel for a 486 as opposed to Slack's stock 386 and it did seem to improve the performance somewhat, although I can't be sure.

I toyed with freebsd a while back(v4.5?) , but it was on a different machine which had a cd drive, I can't tell you if freebsd will install via nfs/network, I do know that Slackware will.

Ok~
As a follow up for any one who is in a similar situation, I have landed on netbsd as my operating system for this laptop. Unfortunately, although the laptop has exactly 8 mb of RAM, some of it is allocated by the BIOS, so I had to go back a little to the smaller NetBSD 1.5.1 laptop bootdisks (I couldn't do a swapON because of Hd format issued).

I'm having a lot of trouble finding a NIC that will work on the NetBSD install though. I thinkg my best bet is the Novell NE2000, but I can't find one anywhere. If any one knows where I could get one, I would really appreciate them telling me about it.


Thanks a lot,
Andrew