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I'm doing some teaching now that could be aided by use of a smallish 
laptop (I have to fly a couple of times a month to where I teach, so 
portability is a concern). I've located a laptop for this. It's a Toshiba 
Portege 3020ct with a Celeron 300 CPU, 96 MB RAM, and a 6 GB HD. Now, I 
have to decide which OS to put on it. BL is a natural choice because of 
the relatively weak resources this machine has, but I see some potential 
pitfalls installing and running it and want to pose some questions about 
that here as I go about deciding.

First, I will need a decent graphical browser. I know I can install Opera 
and have experimented a bit with installing Opera under BL on other, less 
powerful machines. The last machine I tried this on was a P1 133 laptop 
with only 32 MB of RAM. I did manage to get the browser running but had 
some issues, as follows. I ran the install script like Steven's directions 
indicate and, right after the installation, the browser ran simply by 
issuing the command opera froma terminal. After rebooting, however, when I 
tried running the same command from a terminal, the browser would not 
start and I got an error message about a wrapper script. What is the 
source of this wrapper script problem and how can it be fixed?

Secondly, some elements in certain web pages did not display properly in 
Opera under BL. I think the problem there is that BL contains only a very 
limited selection of fonts and characters. The browser (and web page 
authors) expect a wider set to be available. If I understand correctly the 
nature of this problem, the browser is displaying the limited set of 
characters it has available under BL when rendering elements on certain 
pages and the final result looks a bit wierd (e.g., question marks being 
rendered where one would expect bullets). Have I understood the nature of 
this rendering issue and, if so, what is the solution? Installing a fuller 
set of fonts from Slack4?

I will need a wordprocessing program on this machine and, of course, I 
know Abiword is available for BL. It could surely suffice for my needs but 
for one possible hitch: does the version of Abiword that comes with BL 
export to pdf? If not, can some sort of plugin be added that will allow it 
to do so? Another alternative would be as follows: export to ps, then use 
ps2pdf to convert the resulting ps file. If BL's Abiword does not export 
to pdf, can it save as or export to ps?

Also, I will need to do some instant messaging from this laptop. naim is 
available for BL, and was compiled for BL against uclibc by David Moberg a 
couple of years ago, if memory serves. However, my latest experiments with 
naim under BL reveal that the version he compiled does not currently work. 
Perhaps a more updated version of naim needs to be compiled? Would David 
or someone else onlist be willing to compile the newest release of naim 
against uclibc for BL?

Finally, a major issue, and one that may be the showstopper for putting BL 
on this laptop, is printing: I must be able to print from this laptop. I 
have acquired an older laserjet printer for this purpose--a Canon LBP 430. 
I've tested the printer with my newer desktop that runs the latest release 
of Ubuntu, so I know it is compatible with newer versions of Linux. But I 
am unsure how I might go about getting it to work under BL, or even if I 
can expect it to work at all. I would appreciate input on this printer 
issue, specifically whether I can expect to get it printing under BL 3.5 
relatively painlessly and, if so, what steps I would need to take in order 
to do that. I should mention that I may, from time to time, need to print 
documents that have foreign words on them (in Greek, perhaps Hebrew and/or 
Slavonic).

Input will be appreciated.

Thanks,
James