Toshiba Libretto - best distribution

From: Oli Restorick (oli_at_mvps.org)
Date: 07/19/03 

Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 21:36:31 +0100

Hi all

First off, I'm a Linux newbie, so please forgive my question. I want to
install a Linux distribution onto my Toshiba Libretto 100CT with 64Mb RAM
and a 6Gb HDD.

The purpose for the installation is purely as a network sniffer with tools
like Ethereal and tcpdump (although if you know better ones I'm all ears).

My network card is a Xircom RealPort CardBus Ethernet 10/100 (RBE-100) and I
have the PCMCIA floppy drive that came with the Libretto and a Sony Vaio
PCGA-CD51 PCMCIA CD-ROM that works fine under Windows 2000.

As you've probably gathered by now, getting Linux onto this chappy is
proving to be a challenge. From what I gather, the distributions that use
two floppies to boot run into difficulties when the second disk needs to be
read, since there are no PCMCIA drivers loaded at that point and that's the
only floppy drive available.

The CD-ROM is not bootable. For a while, it looked like SBOOTMGR from my
Slackware 9 CD would do that trick, but of course it can't see the PCMCIA
CD-ROM.

I have the option of removing the HDD from the laptop and plugging it into a
desktop machine (in this case a Dell PowerEdge 600SC that is my testbed
machine). I tried this earlier with Slackware 9 and when it came to boot
from the new installation, I was greeted with an "L" on bootup and it hung
(that was before transplanting the drive back to the Libretto). Since I'd
previously installed Slackware 9 to the Dell, I know that it works. I think
I screwed up with the disk partitioning or formatting somewhere along the
line.

Also, is transplanting an installation from one machine to another OK with
Linux? If I use the basic kernel, is that OK?

Finally, what is the best distribution for network sniffing? Being a Linux
novice, I'd like one that had all the good utilities built in. I can't find
a distribution that contains Ethereal. I have broadband, so there's no
problem for me to download whichever distribution would be best.

Thanks for any and all help.

Regards

Oli

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