[luau] 4mb Laptop

[MonMotha]

Michael Ableyev wrote:
> Hullo all,
> 
> I have a whole set of questions here.
> 
> I'm considering/trying to replace my linux router with another linux router. (a much smaller and quieter one).
> To be or not to be?: Will a Toshiba Sattelite T1910CS (486SX 33mhz / 4mb ram) suffice or should I just forget it?

4MB systems are basically impossible to do anythign with these days. 
You might be able to get slackware installed if you use the old 
rootdisks that are run from the floppy, instead of loaded into a 
ramdisk.  You'll have to bring up swap by hand before you can load setup 
also.

Keep in mind that with only 4MB, you're not going to be able to do NAT 
or stateful firewalling because the connection tracker won't haev any 
room to store entires.  All connection tracking data is NON-SWAPPABLE. 
The kernel alone will take up a few 100k of RAM, then the bare 
essentials of userspace...

If you still want to do this, your best bet is to make yourself a custom 
distro, probably using uClibc to keep memory usage down.  But you'll 
still have problems with untracked connections with that tiny amount of 
RAM (my 486 /w 12MB had problems just on a dialup...).

> 
> Bloated?: I'm currently trying to put slackware 8.0 on it cutting down to only a few packages of choice (200mb disk). Should I
> continue to do that or just use something else? (keep in mind - 4mb ram)

Read above.  200MB disk is plenty for this, the RAM is what's gunna kill 
you.  No ramdisks will be possible.

> 
> How to?: So far I got this far. I created a separate, temporary partition onto which I loaded the contents of color.gz, was able to
> boot from bareapm.i floppy and mount this partition as well as get the pcmcia nic to work.  (Yak! I hate the floppies!) Is it
> possible to somehow install over ftp or is nfs share the only way?

NFS is the only way to network install slackware in 8.0.  I think 8.1 
added FTP/HTTP support, but I'm not sure (and 8.1 isn't worth it anyway 
for this).

--MonMotha