Im looking for a very small distribution. I have a pentium laptop with 48mb and 1.2 gig just need to install console dev tools, lynx, email and networking(samba server).

There''s the often recommended ZipSlack, but it probably goes even farther than you need. You could always try the real Slackware instead with minimal packages.

Debian is pretty minimal by default. There are a number of derivatives of Debian (most of which have custom installers, if Debian''s current-stable installer bothers you), some of which might be able to fill the role of "small distribution" (Bonzai Linux, comes to mind as a possibility). I prefer to do a bare bones installation of Debian (skip the dselect step) and build it up from there post-installation, if you care at all.

While you probably know about it already, I might as well include it: there are a lot of niche distros if you want to take a look at the list on DistroWatch on your own.

I was on distro watch , t Damn Small linux looked promissing.

Assuming that''s 48MB of RAM and 1.2G of disk space?

Any distribution''s minimal will probably work with that disk space, then you can build a custom kernel with your bare minimums to reduce the memory footprint, cut your running daemons to the bare bones as well.

Int.

Why not look at OpenBSD? I have it running on that exact configuration as a router/firewall, and it works fine. It has everything you seem to need, and is about a 70MB download. I believe you have to get SAMBA from the package tree, though. The documentation is great, and if you''ve used a *nix before, it''ll take just a few minutes.

www.openbsd.org


"The sun is the same in a relative way,
but you''re older"
--Pink Floyd