Getting the hardware, and the thoughts behind the project

So my main motivation here: get a working machine that I can do any common office task on, as small and light as practically possible.

I was very tempted by the Toshiba Libretto 110CT, but after following a few auctions on eBay they seemed to have a cult following that was willing to pay prices out of all proportion to its performance. Also, I was unsure that the keyboard would be large enough to touch type on.

Eventually, I won an auction on a Fujitsu Lifebook B-2131 with no hard drive for only $65! It's old, as seen by the specs:
Processor: Intel Celeron 400MHz
RAM: 64 MB standard - I bought ram to max it out at 192 MB as soon as I won the auction.
1 CardBus/PCMCIA slot
Battery life (When new): 3 hours
Weight: 3 lbs

Another one of my criteria was that the machine should be quiet. I really don't like fans, but even the whirring of a hard drive is a bit annoying. So I decided to use a compact flash card in place of a hard drive - which has the additional benefit of being very robust (important in a machine I tote around a lot) and also drawing an order of magnitude less power than a hard drive.

I hunted around for a good deal on a compact flash card, and ended up getting a 4GB TwinMOS Ultra-X 140x card. I thought if it's replacing the hard drive I should aim for something reasonably fast.

The important thing to note about compact flash cards, to any who may be tempted to do something similar, is that they have a finite and relatively low number of write cycles. You can write to a CF card between 100,000 and 1,000,000 times (depends on card & manufacturer) but it will eventually fail. To extend the life of the card as much as possible, the best idea is to choose a linux distribution that can run completely in RAM - and whatever you do, don't set up a swap space on the card!