The trials of installing a modern linux distro on an original Pentium laptop with 80MB of RAM

I got this sweet Toshiba Satellite Pro 440 CDX laptop out of the trash a few years ago.  It had windows 95 on it, a 40GB hdd, and a busted floppy drive.  But it works!  So all I need is a decent OS that support a WiFi PCMCIA card and it can be a fun system to play with...

So I've been shopping distros and trying to figure out what will run on it.  I really want something that's still getting security patches since I want to make this thing network-enabled.

What works on the original pentium cpu?

* Debian 8 and older. 

* AntiX 23 (latest)

* Slackware 15

*

But what will install or run with only 80MB of memory?

* Debian 4

What else?

* Debian 10+ - requires 'cmov' support in the CPU, so is limited to probably Pentium 2 or newer. 

* Alpine 3.16 was the newest alpine build that supported i485 or i586 CPU, but it stopped getting security updates earlier this year. 

* LFS is probably an option

* Gentoo should be an option

* Slackware 15 is where I'm at now.  

* AntiX 23... installed in VM, booted disk in laptop and immediate out of memory error. 

Pretty much everything had an issue.  

TinyCore Linux to the rescue!

This worked!  Modern 6.10 kernel with a GUI running with 80MB of ram on an original Pentium System.  The USB port works for keyboard and mouse, but crashes if I plug in an Ethernet adapter.  

I was able to get WiFi working using an old PCMCIA network card and an unsecured WiFi network.

Doom runs at a very low frame-rate!

I started this post last year some time and just saw that it was incomplete and unpublished, so I added the bit of info about TinyCore and clicked publish.  Hopefully this will guide someone in a fruitful direction when working on old hardware.