Debian on Older Equipment?

[Steve Holmes]

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I have an old Toshiba laptop Satelite 300 with a wappin' 32 megs of
memory with a 266 MHz processor.  Slackware runs fine on it but I
thought I would try to install Debian Lenny on it but I can't get
speakup to come up at all.  Is there a chance that Debian's kernels
just don't work on this little pup? I tried the usual procedure with
both a full CD for I386 and the netinst disk for I386 downloaded today
and I did the down arrow once followed by tab then
'speakup.synth=spkout'.  The disk cycled up at the appropriate times
but silence.  I verified that this disk and procedure work on another
machine and it talked OK.  I even tried an additional option of
'fb=false' thinking maybe it were a framebuffer.  Still no go.  I
experimented once by specifying 'console=ttyS0,9600,n,8' and listened
to see if the Speakout would talk at all and sure enough, it did.  It
appeared to me that the kernel actually came up but there was a lot of
stray characters (probably for terminal control or something) but it
proved to me that the kernel appears to boot and my serial connection
to the laptop is good.

So after all this messing around, is Debian too big for my laptop? I
guess I could keep on with Slackware as that still works fine.  I was
just thinking I would begin to switch all my boxen over to Debian.

Any ideas?
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