Linux on an Olivetti Echos 44 Notebook
--------------------------------------
Florian Wisser, February 2001, florian.wisser@univie.ac.at

This is a small report of a linux installation on the following notebook.

Hardware (~1995):
Olivetti Echos 44
CPU: Intel 486-DX2@66MHz
Ram: 4MB
HD:  350MB
   Partition	Type	Size in MB	Description
   hda1		aa	8		A hybernation partition which i left
					from the previous Windows system.
   hda2		82	32		swap
   hda3		83	250		rootfs on running system
   hda4		81/83	64		rootfs on minix fs during installation
					later /home
FD:  1.44MB integrated
NIC: Surecom PCMCIA 10Mbit, (Realtek chip)

The debian 2.1 (aka slink) distribution comes with a bootfloppy dedicated to
machines with less than 5MB. Debian 2.2 (aka potato) has no such bootfloppy.
The diskimage is called lowmem.bin. 
The installer guides you through the process of putting the root system to
the temporary minix partition, which can be used for what ever you desire
after the installation. The installation is documented at www.debian.org
under the following link.

http://www.debian.org/releases/slink/i386/ch-rescue-boot.en.html#s-low-mem

I experienced, that the swap and temporary root partitions have to be
larger than described. I dont know the exact limits but 2MB for the temporary
root did not work for me. 

NOTE: Turn of all power managment settings in the BIOS during installation. 
Otherwise the system hangs after spinning down the harddrive. You can leave this
settings since your harddrive will never spin down for long because of swapping.
You can access the BIOS with "Fn-F4" during bootup.

I did the floppy installation of slink, which leaves you with a basic
system with PCMCIA network support. From their i used apt-get to upgrade
to potato (debian 2.2) from an ftp server and to install the packages i like. 
apt-get is a really cool upgrading tool but it is extremely slow on this kind 
of machine.

Compiling a new minimalistic kernel, with everything i need compiled in
except for PCMCIA, gave quit a boost in performance and shortened boot time. 
To install new PCMCIA modules for the new kernel i did the following.
I compiled the modules on my workstation, where i compiled the new kernel
before, copied the make command to the notebook and mounted the sources,
the kernel-header files and the gcc-lib directory from the workstation
via nfs on my notebook. "make install" did the rest. This method enables
you to compile and install whatever you desire without installing large
development libraries on your tiny harddisk.

Since swapping is one of the central activities of such a notebook i tried
to tweak the harddisk with hdparm. However after i typed "hdparm -tT /dev/hda"
the machine only said "Out of memory" and neither local nor remote login was
possible any longer. I tried "hdparm -c 1 -d 1 -m 4 -k 1 /dev/hda" but
afterwards nearly all commands failed and i had to reboot. It seems to me,
that notebook harddrives are much more sensible with tweaking than others.

Installing memstat enables you to look, which processes eat up how much 
memory. 

I installed the ash shell to save memory, but working without history
and tab completion is a pain in the but.

Clearly, the editor of choice is vim. Their is some speed difference to
a plain vi, but for comfort i decided to spend that time and memory.

Since i use this notebook as a TeX enviroment i installed the whole tetex
package together with dvisvga which is a dvi viewer working without X.

I also installed a few network monitoring tools, to use the notebook for
diagnostics.

Thats it.