[ Thanks to honey
for this link. ]
Old computers (like a laptop with 4MB) make for great editing
and light duty work terminals. This small HOWTO examines the issues
around getting Debian installed on one:
“Before following the process described here, you can
try to install Debian from the installation disk set. Make sure
that you replace the kernel on the boot disk with a kernel which
does not consume so much memory. I don’t know exactly where I ran
into problems (because I did this install described in here a while
ago), but I tried hard and fell back on the approach described in
this howto, so good look and please tell me if you get it
working.”