old notebook conversion

[Shawn Rutledge]

On Tue, Jul 02, 2002 at 02:24:28PM -0700, tickticker wrote:
> I just got my hands on an OLD notebook.  it's an acer model, here's the rough specs from the tertiary site supporting such old machines.
> 
> System Info
> PN: 91.AA201.017
> MB: AN760I
> Ext: 786
> Model: AN760i
> RAM: 8 MB
> Video: 512 KB
> Cache: 0 KB
> 
> AN760I, w/ IDX4/75, 8MB RAM 
> 1.44 MB, 3.5" AcerNote
> 540 MB, DBOA-2540 2.5 IBM
> 8 MB Memory on-board
> Chips & Technology 65535 (Onboard)
> 
> Keyboard, 18511-NSK
> LCD, AN735/760 Color Sharp LM64C142
> 

> Ah! no cd you say? 540 mg HDD? 8 mg RAM? could it have the original
win95 install? why YES!!!

Just remember that was a cool enough system in the mid 90's... so keep
the software as simple as it was then and you should be OK.  You should
be able to run X, but just use a really small window manager like fvwm or
wm2.  fvwm takes time to configure, but dotfile helps immensely.  As much
as I like Debian, you might want Slackware on such a limited system, to
keep the size down and keep the init scripts etc. as simple as possible. 
dpkg and apt are not very fast on older systems.  If newer Slackwares
have too much gook you can go back to an old one... but I think they are
still just as simple as they ever were.  If X ends up too big for you,
you can get tinyX.

I'd always use ReiserFS on a laptop these days... no danger of needing
to fsck it if your battery runs down before you can shutdown.  And it
might be more efficient with small files too (/dev, /etc, etc.)

I hope you have a network card, so you don't have to create a huge stack
of floppies?  I remember doing Slackware installs that way, back in the
day... it took 30 or 40 I think.

-- 
  _______                   Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD  ecloud@bigfoot.com
 (_  | |_)                       http://ecloud.org  kb7pwd@kb7pwd.ampr.org
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