With due respect to those who suggested that the best highest use of my 486 laptop is as a doorstop, and that my time is best spent elsewhere... that's for me to decide. Linux is *supposed* to run on older machines. Any '386 or later should do the job. If it doesn't, many people would consider that a bug. So I took Sam's (and others') suggestion and tried Debian again. It works like a charm... sort of. I can certainly boot and run text mode stuff just fine. The WD90C24 video chip is rather old, though, and X starts in (ugh) 320x200 mode. Tips for getting 640x480x8 bits would be lovely. Even a 320x200 display of a larger virtual desktop would make it a LOT more usable. I don't plan to run X on it most of the time, but I did want to see how painful it is to use on the machine. I plan to make it a samba print server, and the debian documents only say that you should use the graphical tools and it's a snap. There's no mention of configuration files, which I would be happy to tweak with vi. I plan to put my effort on ThinkWiki once it gets to a good spot. Chris Schumann