In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux

I just used Debian Sid.

I retired a 350MHz 128MB laptop in March. Up till then, it had been running Debian Sid, with the latest kernel and everything, just fine.

I did replace the HD, from 4GB to 60GB last year, but even with just 4GB of disk space, it worked just fine. It wouldn't _play_ video, so there was no need for a disk big enough for video files.

Neither KDE nor GNOME were the default desktop, but as we all know those applications ran just fine on OLWM, TWM, XFCE, whatever.

Maybe it's just that I didn't expect to be running a bunch of tabs in Konqueror, Kmail, OOo and Firefox all at the same time.

My vote wouldn't be for either Puppy or DSL. The newly released Vector Linux Light fits the bill very nicely and is designed to run in as little as 64MB of RAM. It offers a choice of JWM, Fluxbox, or LXDE.

One innovative feature is VL-Hot which pops up desktop icons for removable media without constantly polling the hardware like the HAL daemon does. The net result is easy support for thinks like USB sticks without the performance hit. VL-Hot works with both the JWM and LXDE desktops but not with Fluxbox.

Vetcor has a pretty nice repository of additional software and is Slackware compatible.

Another option to try might be the Mepis derivative AntiX. I haven't tried it personally, but Steven seems to like Debian derivatives, so it might fit the bill.

> Another option to try might be the Mepis derivative AntiX.

AntiX is compatible with the Debian Lenny repositories. It's i686 only, but you've got a Pentium II, so no problem.

I haven't tried AntiX since it first came out, but I did like it back then. My main test box is not i686 (with the VIA C3), so I can't try it out there, and I don't recall being able to boot it on the Compaq with the Pentium II, but I could be wrong about that.

Vector Light isn't something that I considered, mostly because I didn't know about it. But I've always thought highly of Vector Standard, which does Fluxbox VERY well. For my Slackware-derived distro, I focused on Wolvix Cub. Both Cub and Wolvix Hunter fit my needs and eccentricities extremely well.

The one thing that drew me away from all three BSDs, aside from learning that the average Linux distro is much quicker (and that's very important with 233 MHz of CPU), you really learn to appreciate all that a full distribution brings to the table. Ostensibly everything in the default state of the installed distro works pretty well, and that usually turns out to be true. I haven't had as much success building up my own system from scratch. I had more success with OpenBSD than most, but the speed issue really made it less workable.

Folks, this entry was Part 1, and there are seven more installments to go. I've had this thing in the can for at least a month and haven't taken the time until now to post it.

... But Part 2 will have to wait until the server that hosts my blog and a few hundred others is rolled back to yesterday's backup. Somebody, somehow, screwed up MySQL and corrupted the data, and nothing's working.

I'd be curious to find out how well Netsurf would work as a replacement for Firefox. It's modern, as opposed to Dillo, but far lighter than Firefox, much better for old systems.

I'm still trying to figure out adding packages to the latest Puppy. Puppy 3 allowed the installation of Slackware packages, but that's no longer true.

I downloaded Netsurf sources and I'm going to build it for my Vector Linux system and see how it plays. Another choice that would work for him is Opera, but it isn't Open Source.

In my tests (speaking from memory) with Debian Lenny, Netsurf used about 75% of the memory of Opera. I had previously used Opera for older computers because it is so much lighter than Firefox. There's no way Netsurf offers anything close to the functionality of Opera.

I have tried Netsurf, and it's pretty comparable to Dillo as far as speed goes. I'm going to be trying Opera very soon because a Web-based application I use that is supposedly IE only will also work with Opera. That's a great thing to find out because I'm not so hot on installing WINE and IE when I don't have to.

Yeah, Opera isn't FOSS, but it's more palatable than IE/WINE

I personally view non-FOSS as okay, provided no one tries to own my data or lock me into using their application. That seldom is the case, however.