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I have several old laptops that I want to use to test network connections. I would like to use Ethereal (or something similar), a convenient DHCP utility, and any program that can speak CDP (cisco discovery protocol). Anything more advanced, like benchmarking apps, would be a plus but aren't necessary. I'm also not sure that I need a GUI, but trying to make sense of a protocol analyzer's output in wrapped text seems difficult.

I would just load Windows or Debian, but these laptops have 600Mhz processors or less, and I want to use the smallest OS that will do what I want.

Any Suggestions?

If you want a light Operating system I'd suggest OpenBSD, It includes quite a few networking applications(tcpdump etc..), And has a simple text based installation.

With a base install, You can get a fully functional system using around 400/500Mb of disk space. (But having a larger drive is recommended.. )

As for the CPU speed, 600mhz is more then adequate for many things, I have a few Pentium 2 workstations that clock around 400mhz and work perfectly fine even with X running.

In any case, OpenBSD generic can run on 386 systems still.. Works nicely on older 486-class laptops also.

http://www.openbsd.org/

How much work are wanting to do yourself, as dex OS has full working stack with most protocols done, and is very light, with a disk size of less than 64k including OS.
But only as drivers for rtl8139 ethernet card, for now.

for size, get DSL
also, on old machines you might want to consider an "ancient" version of windows: '98. Runs smoothly on an 486DX. Not sure wether it handles laptops properly, but then again, even *nix or *bsd might not work out of the box...

Wow how did DSL fit all that into 50MB, they must of use a packer.
To fill the rest of the 49MB with 0 .

I would go for FreeBSD. It will run on a 486 with 32MB of memory and <500MB of harddrive space.

To tell you the truth, any operating system will run on a 600Mhz(except vista), if you have a lot of memory(>256) and some hardrive space(2gb), then just install windows xp,(I've ran (for 2 yesrs) windowx xp on a pentium 400(256 meory and a 6 gb hardrive), and had no problems). Even DOS will do what you need it to do.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm playing with DSL at the moment, and I'll try some of the BSD variants tomorrow.

Thanks again.

Uhh, dlx? Linux on a floppy...

The only problem is that it's hopelessly outdated.

Or, an LFS installation can be done for size; for installation, you could set up the install on a full machine (e.g., your beowulf :- ), and then copy it onto the laptops.

If you choose to use gentoo or roll your own, I would recommend kdrive as an X server, running on fbdev. Both are small and get reasonable performance for what you're using it for. In addition, try fluxbox as a window manager; it's one of the smaller WMs avaliable.

And linux will certainly run just fine on those laptops. I started using linux on an 83 MHz doorstop, with 24 megs of RAM, and a Diamons Stealth Pro VLB graphics card (NEW! now with 2D Graphics accelleation!).. . all of which has since been accidentally melted into slag.