Debian on Older Equipment?

[luke]

My guess: a problem with the ramdisk which the installer uses as a working 
system.

I wonder if there is a way to have it run as a livecd?



On Thu, 13 Nov 2008, Steve Holmes wrote:

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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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