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Running A Current Distribution On A Little Old Laptop

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HowTos

My Amity CN has 48MB of RAM so performance on a system with 32MB may be poor. Damn Small Linux with X windows does require a minimum of 32MB of RAM. It should run in text-only mode (runlevel 2) on an Amity CN with 16MB of RAM. Memory upgrades for the Amity are dirt cheap (as in under $20) so upgrading to 48MB of RAM is highly recommended.

You will also need some method of transferring the contents of the Damn Small Linux iso to your Amity CN hard drive, such as a PCMCIA or parallel port CD-ROM drive or a PCMCIA network card and a functioning network connection in the operating system currently installed.

NOTE: A lot of this is not terribly Amity specific and may well work on other older laptops which do not have the ability to boot from CD-ROM or USB and have at least 32MB of RAM, such as the Toshiba Libretto 50CT, 60CT, 70CT, and 100CT.

Full Story.

Re: Linux is not Win95C and IE5.5 ?

Your point is a bit off, because the author of the article. (the person who put Damn Small Linux onto such a low end system), didn't do his research properly. Haven't you seen embedded Linux platforms and kiosks?

He should've used an embedded/micro version of Linux and desktop environment without X server.

Instead of X server, you use an embedded version of Gnome and DirectFB. This way, you get rid of X server altogether. (which is a bit unsuitable for this person's obsolete system).

DirectFB was designed for such low-end or embedded solutions. It will provide you with hardware acceleration with minimal waste on resources. Go to http://www.directfb.org and you'll see what I mean. You can surf the web, etc, or whatever you did with Win95/IE 5.5 using this approach.

The only issue, is that it may be a bit tedious to set up. But then again, we're talking about a Linux person that did the article, not a Linux newbie.

Specs of that laptop

"NeoMagic MagicGraph 128ZV onboard video, 1MB video RAM"
Ah.. I remember when I had a 1MB Video Card back in the days. Smile

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