Patrick Lambe wrote:

> My question isn't directly related, but is in the same arena. I've got a
> laptop that I use primarily for windows development/games/surfing etc but I
> would like to have relatively small linux distro on it for those occasions
> when only Linux will do (network sniffing/configuration/testing etc) But
> I'm humming and hahing about whether to go with leaf + all the other stuff
> I find I need or whether to just bite the bullet and install a mainstream
> distro with pretty much everything turned off. I guess my prime
> consideration is that I don't want to waste any more disk space than
> necessary (as if windows isn't wasting enough of it ;o) Any thoughts?

Running on a laptop typically requires you to support PCMCIA - and no
one's put together a turnkey system for Linux and PCMCIA.  Getting
standard full implementation Linux running with PCMCIA is hard all by
itself.

When using networking, it may also entail supporting Parallel Port
Network devices - Xircom devices do *NOT* have support, and likely still
do not.  Xircom refused to release hardware specifications to the Linux
community for MANY years - and may still refuse.

Other Parallel Port devices are supported.

Also, some floppy drives on laptops are flakey - some won't accept the
high-density disks - and some are just strange.  Apparently the ThinkPad
disk drive is one, since the kernel has a boot-time parameter for it
(!).

Some people are regularly using PCMCIA-based laptops with LEAF; someone
should speak up.  If you can make it simple, many people would be
interested.

Network sniffing and testing tools are available in
http://leaf.sourceforge.net/pub/oxygen/packages/

You'll also probably need a distribution that can boot multiple disks,
as many of the network tools require the ncurses library and the pcap
library - and some even require the libdb library.

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