[Gllug] Daughter inherits 486 laptop ... err what can I make it run?

[Tom Hannen]

your situation is very similar to mine - 

I've got a Compaq Contura 486 DX 50 Mhz 20MB RAM 400MB HDD laptop
With a floppy but no CDROM drive.

I've bought a PCMCIA Type II Ethernet NIC for it, and I'm planning to
install Deli Linux on it (see here  http://www.delilinux.de/ ) then
booting from a couple of floppies, and installing over FTP.

The original card I bought had some very odd drivers that didn't seem
to behave correctly, so I've bought one with a more common chipset,
which should arrive tomorrow!

There seem to be lots of options in terms of low powered computing for
linux - things like the Links browser, and lower versions of Abi Word
for word processing....  Also if you want to run a window manager,
I've read good things about iceWM on older systems.

But this is all speculation, as I haven't got mine up and running yet...

Tom




On 8/7/05, M.Blackmore <mblackmore at oxlug.org> wrote:
> Daughter (8yr old and budding author) is inheriting my old 100mhz 486
> with 20mb ram and 1.6gb disk.
> 
> Don't laugh ... this was hot stuff about 12 years back!
> 
> But what can I do with it now so she can have a nice GUI system that
> will enable her to do email thru our network server, get at the www, and
> have a wysiwig wordprocessor.
> 
> There seems no way I can get anything to work under W95 that will allow
> her to access modern www...
> 
> Just what can one do with such a low resource machine if a GUI is
> wanted?
> 
> 
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