After some thought, there's no way out for X other than finding a hardware solution that gets you a swap partition (and even then the processor will make it tough). Yes, it'll _run_ in half of the 98MB. Run. Once it's up. And cli/no X would be fine -- _if_ you can get it loaded (which takes more than that). I honestly don't know if it will and am partly surprised you got it that far. It's Debian 12/Bookworm under the antiX 23 so those requirements should apply.
Even if you pulled the drive and loaded DSL using other hardware and restored it to the toughbook, X applications (more than one at once) will benefit from (if not outright require) additional swap. I'd say zram, too, if not for the processor, so even that might be counter-productive.
IMO, it looks pretty-far past "pushing-it" on hardware for Debian 12/bookworm-based stuff (but better than Trixie). That-said, many of us are in tight spots so, for *informational* purposes:
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Populating /dev can take a *long* time, though, sometimes on the old/slow cpu's so make sure you've given it a good chance to complete.
With the big caveat that what happens on hardware isn't necessarily what happens in vbox:
Just tested 96MB w/o swap in Vbox and it hung at /dev populating. Added a 512MB swap partition and it completed. I've never done the experiments to find the ragged edge of minimum for swap.
Choose the bottom ram setting "lowerram" (which shows as lessram in boot parameters).
Hypothetically, with luck, that'll land you inside bare flux (right click for menu)
< Of course with CF "drive", a swap partition is not the straight-forward route so again this is all informational for others that may gain something from it >
In case of no joy, you may have to experiment with
antiX boot parameters, as well.
Appending a 3 is supposed to get us to single-user if it'll boot at all--then at least you can rule-out X. Can also try vga=ask and choose known good modes.
If indeed vesa is a problem, try appending
and see if anything different happens. Absent knowledge of hardware details (and unable to find video chip/onboard, etc. in web searches), no further help possible (oldest wayback panasonic toughbook pages ca 2005).
What I'm seeing here (in vbox!) is one Should be able to fit a minimal X inside a peak usage of 80MB (dropping back under 50), but YMMV.
If you get that far, you might experiment to see if JWM uses less RAM than flux (boot screen F-key options).
If X wont go but you can get it to a text terminal, you can use cfdisk, cli-installer, etc. Now that I try it, appending a 3 or a single isn't working for me in this vbox instance.
The other thing you can do, if RAM is killing you and if you don't care about the drive, is just use other hardware to get DSL loaded and then put the drive back in and reconfigure once it'll boot (if it'll boot). Honestly, the real install even using the cli-installer will need something closer to 300MB than 100MB to complete its operations (antiX legacy code not optimized for that). [Parenthetically, I once tested the antiX cli netinstall and it would not complete in less than 416M so it's not as lean as more conventional installation of cli-installer (have not tested to find hard edge to RAM for that yet, either).]
Most people with old, old machines (this seems W95/8-ish?) are going to need to start with a pre-existing swap partition (DSL will detect and use it). Maybe there's a HD on ebay or somewhere (?)
If it is an unsupported X thing, you can try to find an appropriate older antiX or flavor of Puppy, etc. If you can find a way to post an
somehow for posterity, it'll help someone else sometime.
Please keep us posted if you are so-inclined.
