Do they have floppy drives? You may be able to use a floppy Linux. Console only, but you could connect to another machine that has screen, as we have been discussing here. If they have CD drives and enough ram, you could run a LiveCD. For older hardware, try DamnSmall Linux, as previously mentioned here. It even has a lot of cool, small programs. http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ DamnSmall http://www.toms.net/rb/ Tom's RootBoot http://www.pycs.net/lateral/stories/4.html Using Debian http://distrowatch.com/puppy Puppy Linux http://featherlinux.berlios.de/ Feather Linux

The 486 with 4MB is harder to deal with. Look for the page about Small Linux. You can get a pre-compiled minimal kernel and a small vesa driver. I don't recall if they had an ISO or anything, maybe floppy images to get you started. You will have to do a lot of manual stuff on this one. With modern kernels, as was discussed last night at the LUG, you need at least 8MB of ram, BUT you can compile for 4MB PCs. Here is the link: http://www.superant.com/smalllinux/ http://www.advogato.org/proj/Small%20Linux/

http://peeweelinux.com/ http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Small+Linux&btnG=Google+Search I'm sure you can find more on your own. Check Distrowatch and dig thru the list of distros in the ibiblio.org pub dir http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/

Brian Kelsay

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Duane Attaway <> 12/02/04 05:47AM >>>

I have several old laptops that could live a good life of xterminals. Unfortunately, some don't have hard drives, most have memory less than 64MB, and one is a 486 with 4MB. All can use a pcmcia ethernet card.

What do most people do with these? Are there distributions catering to these or do I have to build them myself?

I'd hate throw them away. They use so little power, have well designed hardware, and look nice.