Laptops :: DSL on an NEC Ready 120LT

Hi everyone, newbie to DSL (and Linux as a whole) here. I'm anxiously awaiting the arrival of my latest eBay purchase, an NEC 120LT laptop. I had one of these in high school (when they were new) and fell in love with it. I hope to install a lightweight Linux OS when it arrives, and DSL seems to be the best choice thus far.

It's powered by a 200 MHz Cyrix MediaGXi (Pentium Pro equivalent, AFAIK). It has 64 MB RAM, 2.1 GB HD and a cute little 8" 640x480x16bit display. The CD-ROM and floppy are both external proprietary connectors, and both are bootable. If I remember correctly, it shipped as a Win98 SE machine.

I found this page online already detailing one user's experience with getting Linux installed on the 120LT, but it seems to be somewhat aged and may not fully apply to a DSL installation anyway..

Can anyone tell me, after looking at the specs and the information on that page, if a HD install of DSL should be a fairly straightforward experience? Do you see any potential pitfalls I might avoid with some advance knowledge?

I'd also like to pick up an 802.11something card that works without too much configuration. Any recommendations?

I plan to learn Linux with this little computer and hope to not get discouraged early on by hardware struggles. Thanks in advance for anyone's help!

The page you linked to didn't specify any problems or difficulties installing linux on that laptop. In my experiences, dsl (usually) just works! I don't think you'll have any problems. I would recomend doing a frugal install (search the forms as to the various advantages for doing it this way). I predict that if you put dsl in the cdrom (set the laptop to boot from cdrom) it will boot right up no problems... I'm an optimist, but probably right.

I had some problems installing dsl on my Toshiba tecra 730cdt (because of my own errors... don't boot the dsl cd with the ' toram ' boot option if you plan on doing the hdinstall or frugal for that matter, it caused me problems). Other than that, my 100mhz 48mb RAM tecra works great!

Thanks for that, dmizzel. Is there any special tweaking to do when installing Linux with a non-Intel CPU, such as this Cyrix?

original here.