Anyone know of any tips sharing Win98 & Linux on an old laptop?

I'd like to keep windows and have it multi-boot so I can choose either Linux or Windows.

How much space would I need to run Linux, since I only have limited space? I might be able to free up a few gigs but not sure, so I'd probably want a light linux thats fully functional but I don't necessarily need a fully decked GUI, unless I can fit it in.

Any recommended distros that are easy to install and aren't bloated as in unnecessary features.

The only other issue I see is that the laptop is a Japanese model with Windows 98, so I can pratice my Japanese on it. I'd guess though, this shouldn't be a problem.

Main reason I want linux is that while traveling I can further develop my programming skills, use a light OS so I can do some web development, and networking stuff and maybe play some Linux nethack and so on. =)

What are the specs on the laptop?

You could always install FC3 and you XFCE instead of one of the large lumbering GUI's. You can do custom installs so you can really tweak everything the way you want it.

uhm you can easely run linux on 1 gb .

You can use fips or so to split a fat partition in 2 parts.
then you can install linux in one of them and use a bootloader to start either linux or win98

At least that is how I did it at my place.

(as I'm low on memory on that laptop I wrote my own .xinitrc (so no window manager) just 3 consoles and a clock.

you can run a lot of distros straight from a CD without ever installing them

one i tried is DSlinux

I would advice that for an old laptop.
as those live distrubutions are resource hungry

well one distro is peanut linux. Very small so i could fit on a smal hdd.

The laptop if I remember correctly, is a Pentium-3 600mhz, so not too terribly old.

I tried out a couple LiveCDs and they worked fine, like Knoppix and DSLinux. I'm going to have to read on how to install them onto the drive.

Are non-debian distros, like Mandrake, fairly easy to customize a "small" install as well?

linux on old laptops? i don't know what you call old but...

i runned linux on 286 pcs ..... i think you CAN i don't know if you'll be able to run the graphic interface but at least... linux will run in text mode for sure

Just wanted to give an update. I found a pretty good site just devoted to putting LInux on Laptops.

A database on getting Linux on specific laptop models:
http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/

Tools, how-tos and guides on getting Linux on a laptop and mobile devices (pda, cell phones,etc).
http://tuxmobil.org/

As for which distro I'm going to put on the laptop, I'm leaning toward a Debian installation. Debian's apt-get is so very convenient. Ubuntu seems like a good & easy Debian distro that is fairly user friendly like Mandrake. The latest Ubuntu release that's about to become available, v5.0 "Hoary", has some nice features including the ability to resize partitions during the install (NTFS and FAT32).
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/

But i'm open to try other distros.

well if it's debian based then I'm all for it.