Any good, lightweight linux distro for lappy[With Wi-Fi)

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What is that model called? (I will check it up at Wikipedia for technical specifications..)

It's my Compaq Armada 4220T. With it's "docking station" that gives it a CD drive and its second pair of speakers, and the huge RAM upgrade from 32 to 96 Mbytes.

It would appear that my Toshiba T2130CS is not about to run Puppy, as it only has 8Mbytes RAM. It does have a massive 400 Mbyte HDD though.

I don't think you'll find specs for either on Wikipedia.

I just ordered an ASUS EEE 2G Surf. It's Asus's version of a $100 laptop. It comes with Xandros Linux installed. The solid state HDD is only 2GB, but it has 512Mb RAM. It should be small enough to run on your laptop. I want it to install asterisk so I hope I didn't get burned.

Some of the Linux distros are small to download, but then want a 2GB swapper partition so watch out for that. I have used a version of Linux that was so small that it ran fine from a floppy. It had ethernet, but not wifi. It was command line only.

BTW, the 2G surf is only "called" a $100 laptop. It actually costs $250. You can buy a real laptop for that much.

I have no idea what you mean by this. Linux distros never "want" a swap partition. If you take what they offer as a default, the maximum will be 2Gbytes. The current philosophy is roughly "use a swap partition about the same size as your RAM, or up to double that, but never more than 2Gbyte".

In the past, I've extended my swap partitions by adding some extra, while a program was running. That was because it was my own program, which I purposefully designed to employ a very large virtual memory, as a convenient way to avoid over-thinking some of its code. (It was convenient to have a massive tree structure, where the same routes down through it were being taken quite frequently, versus masses that needed to be there, but were rarely accessed. An almost ideal usage of virtual memory.)

All "versions" of Linux run fine from a single floppy, if you remove the hardware modules that you don't need. A pair of floppies will give a system that works on most hardware (the first contains the essential stuff, and you insert the second for extra modules, once the first has been read in to RAM).

There are also several "single floppy" setups that will even get you a GUI, an internet connection and a browser.

Sorry... but people get Linux itself (the kernel) confused with with whole distributions, with a full set of GNU utils, etc.

Pendrivelinux is a good starting point, if you've a Windoze running already.

Back in the 1900's (1990's) QNX released a demo floppy that looked a lot like Windows 95.

I don't recall the name of it, but it ran text mode only off of one 1.4M floppy. You used a windows program to compile the floppy. So basically, it was distributed as a win exe that you ran and told it exactly what kind of hardware you had. Then it would load just the drivers for that hardware. It mostly just needed two network card adapter drivers. It made a machine with two network cards into a NAT server. It bit the dust when they started putting nats in modems and routers.

Anyhow, right now I'm using puppeee linux on a flash drive for my asus 2G. I use it as a recovery disk because it works with NTFS and windows network. The eee does not have a CD drive which makes it hard to install stuff on. I spent all day loading XP on the thing.

puppy, i have desktop running puppy with wi-fi, didnt need the drivers, Im using right now, the RAM is fine dont know about the processor, it might be slow, but it should work

Tried Puppy 4 and I can't get my sound working. I also can't get wireless even with NDISWrapper. Any advice or should I spare myself time and revert back to windows/

What do "lspci | grep audio" and "lsmod | grep snd" say? What happens when you load the ndiswrapper module?

It will still load the prism54 driver that doesn't work and ndiswrrapper says it counldn't find a thing when loading the windows driver.

If ndiswrapper can't find a device then the driver could be wrong. It took me ages to find the correct drive for my USB wireless-B dongle thingy. Does dmesg output anything useful regarding sound. What about using aplay -D for hw:0,1 and plughw:0,1?