I got my Toshiba Libretto 70CT in March 1998. It weighs something less than two pounds and is a little larger than a VHS videotape (a seemingly ubiquitous term of comparison whenever the Libretto comes up), it's got a 120 MHz Pentium MMX and a gig-and-a-half hard drive, and I have it running Linux. Here's a guide to installing Linux on this particular Libretto model.
I got the Libretto because I value portability in the extreme (isn't that obvious?), and also because there's some novelty in having something that small run a serious operating system, as opposed to a PDA OS. I don't use it very much these days, but I still like to tinker around with it. My most recent task was to get Cisco's Aironet 350 card working on it. (I don't need the card for anything else anymore because my current laptop, a Fujitsu Lifebook S6231, has an internal wireless card.)
Despite the Libretto's size--or perhaps because of it--it's surprisingly rugged. For a long time, it went in a small bag clipped to the front of my bicycle, and aside from a few minor scuffs, it suffered no damage. In fact, the only serious problem I ever encountered with it happened after it got dropped--I forget the circumstances--and the video chip got frazzled. Moving a window in Windows 95 would leave a psychedelic trail, which was more annoying than anything else, but since it was only three months old at the time, it was still under warranty and Toshiba repaired and returned it in only a couple of days. I was pretty impressed with Toshiba's customer care.
The place to go for all things Libretto has been, for a long time, the so-called "adorable toshiba libretto" web site at http://www.silverace.com/libretto/, where you can find a comparison of the available models and links to all kinds of pages about the Libretto.
Copyright (c) 2002, 2005 Brian Tung