Re: Toshiba Satalite Pro 480cdt

[NativeAngels]

Hello could you tell me if tinycore would install/work on a Toshiba Satalite Pro 480cdt.
Can i use pcmcia wireless cards with it out of the box ?

[maro]

This question might be a bit too generic to get an answer. I reckon your best bet is to burn a CD-ROM and try it out. One limiting factor could be the amount of RAM available on such a fairly old system. AFAIK the minimum you'll need to boot TC 3.x is 48 MBytes (coming down to 32 MBytes for a MicroCore system). That is for a "plain" system and leaves little room for extensions, so it really depends on what you want to achieve.

In my experience TC can support a range of wireless cards, but not knowing any details you can't possibly expect a more specific answer. In any case there is no support for wireless adaptors in the "base" (i.e. the CD-ROM image), but the "base" supports a wide range of ethernet NICs. If you don't have an ethernet card to download extensions please search this forum carefully as there are already several threads of how to download extensions initially either on a different system, or using a different OS.

[hpstr]

Tinycore is IMHO the best solution to squeeze the max out of an old rig. I run TC 3.4.1 on a Fujitsu Biblo B110, with similar specifications (PI-233MMX, 96MB RAM), and it works very well if you don`t use too heavy applications.

How much RAM do you have? Be sure to beef up to the maximum amount possible (AFAIK 144/160MB, by adding a 128MB module). Don`t worry about the Intel TX chipset`s L2 cache limitation, no workaround is necessary.

ACPI is problematic, but at least you can do a clean shutdown. APM would be better (with DSL/APM, suspend to RAM works for me), but no support yet.
A developer told us they will consider to include APM in a future release. Compiling it in by yourself is not trivial.

Opera is ok (but don`t expect flash, youtube and such things to work smooth). Besides Opera, I mostly use terminal applications.

You might need Xfbdev instead of xvesa.

If you don`t always need sound, load the drivers ondemand to speed up the boot sequence.

If you have some basic Linux knowledge (how to boot a kernel), no need to waste a CD-ROM, as Tinycore consists of just two files.

WLAN won`t run out of the box, you will need to install some few extensions, and your card has to be supported. Just try it (insert it and see dmesg).