Linux on an old laptop

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15 Mar 2006
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I have just acquired an old Toshiba laptop. Its running a Celeron 600Mhz, 64Mb RAM and a 6Gb HDD. Which linux would be a good choice for this old lappy.
 
I just ordered a 128Mb stick off ebay so i can max out the lappy to its full potential of 192Mb. I am probably going to install Puppy linux onto it.
 
I have installed Puppy and it even detected my USB wifi which I have connected to my wifi network, the only issue I have is that it is unable to load webpages but I know that the wifi is working.
 
A flavor of puppy linux ie. one of the pupplets http://www.puppylinux.org/downloads/puplets am using nop 4.0 on a 500mhz 96mb ram ibm570e think pad very nippy and very osxy/vistaish with the dock and analog clock. IT much more user friendly than vanilla puppy as it uses xfce as the windows manager and Opera as the web browser .Puppy Dcl 2008 is also nice also xfce but has firefox and a lot more programs like gimp installed.
 
Thanks for the advice on the puplet you are using, I will look into using that one too. I have to say that I am very impressed with Linux up to now on this old lappy it runs very quickly.
Not sure about ifconfig, where would I enter the command in linux?
 
If you want to run without X11, debian 'stable' is the best on a laptop. Well, even with X11 if you don't want to run snazy stuff (google earth etc). I ran Debian unstable for /years/ on a toshiba Portégé 3480 with a 600Mhz PIII, 192MB memory, 6GB disk. I did extensive c++ programming with it too, with X11 etc.

If you want to run it without X11, it's even better. That old portégé is now running debian stable, with the screen off and two Cardbus ethernet and acts as a router on my LAN... still has a lot to give, and with a bit of care at configuration you can have the disk 'sleeping' 99% of the time and it's virtualy silent.
 
No competition (ish) Gentoo

So long as you have a plan for what you need to run you can set the thing up to get the most out of your hardware.

I do like the sound of original debian though as a second alternative (no one seems into it and its not too shabby if you know what your doing)
 
ok so i loaded the console and entered ifconfig in there, I tried to ping my router but nothing actually happened, I just entered ping and then the IP.
 
I am having no joy whatsoever connecting to my router via wifi, what am I doing wrong? It will not give me a WPA connection when it tests it?
 
I am still unable to connect but have been using the console and discovered some issues with setting up WPA2 on my distro, I have read it should work but I think that the drivers need updating, i have the drivers and know how to mount the usb memory stick but cannot get ndis wrapper to work.
 
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