T-Zone: Japan They do mail order, they answer email in English and carry a lot of palmtop and other strange and wonderful items.

Dynamism A US based seller of the IBM PC110, as well as the Toshiba libretto and other non CE palmtop/ultralight systems.

What To Buy

Compact Flash: Compact flash is fairly expensive, can be quite slow but does leave your PCMCIA slots free and saves power if its mainly read not written. With a bit of tweaking you can get a minimal system using X windows on a 15Mbyte flash card. Because of weaknesses in the PC110/Compactflash set up the configuration is a bit of pain. Your PCMCIA hard disk will "vanish" and become managed by PCMCIA services if you have a compact flash installed [this is actually rather useful with removable disks] but the geometry of the flash drives will be unknown. For the 15Mbyte drives the magic incantation seems to be hdb=noprobe hdb=458,2,32.

PCMCIA Disk: All the existing PCMCIA disks are type 3 (that means they fill all the PCMCIA slots on the unit). It is possible to get a PCMCIA extender which will allow you to put two devices in the machine, at the cost of the disk hanging off the end. Fine on a desk, not good on the move. Disk is the cheap way to get storage.

Fast Modem: T-Zone in Japan sell a custom 33.6k modem upgrade which involves sending their engineers the PC110 to dismember carefully. As far as I am aware their modem also has no UK approvals.

Ethernet: You have a choice here. The PCMCIA services module supports several PCMCIA ethernet cards (comments above apply with regards to disks) and you can also use a parallel port ethernet on the base station. This is quite possibly a better option. Given the number of parallel port devices Linux 2.1.x supports - disk, cdrom, etc you might find lots of uses for it.

Playing The Low End: In theory you don't need anything but a plain 4 or 8Mbyte PC110 to use as a command line based Linux box. If you are using the flash drives for your system then it's a very good idea to use a 2.0.33+ kernel with no_atime enabled as a mount option. That stops file access dates being updated and cuts down on power hungry flash writes. See my hints on Linux in miniature.