minimal system requirements

[Cyprian Laskowski]

Hi,

I am seeking some advice about whether a certain ancient laptop will
be sufficient for my minimal purposes.

I will be moving to Japan for a while and my friend has an old laptop
which he's offered to give me with the following basic specs: Pentium
75, 24 MB RAM, and 540 MB harddrive.

I'd like to install a debian linux system on it with X, and pretty
much nothing else (although it would also be great to have LaTeX and
ghostscript, but I think that's pushing it).  The two primary uses
would be light email usage and very light newsgroup reading (through a
modem connection, and using gnus), and Japanese vocabulary testing
(using kdic.el, vocab-test.el, and VTE); so I would also need the
Emacs fonts (at least for Japanese and Greek).  It would also be nice
to have non-intensive use of the Internet (with w3m through emacs).
So this would be an emacsocentric universe, of course!

Looking at debian.org and the Emacs 21 INSTALL page, it seems that the
laptop would be sufficient for this.  But I would appreciate any
advice or experience that anyone could share with me, regarding this
sort of plan.  I love Emacs and Linux, but am not very good with
hardware and not too good with below-the-surface unix, so I might not
be well equipped to handle strange problems or nuances that develop.
And so, although I can have the laptop for free, I want to try to
figure whether there is a point to taking it.

Thanks in advance!


cyp