The fun of legacy hardware

Yeah... The guy would have been a lot better if he had started out with a simpler/smaller OS to begin with. Even Xubuntu might have been a better choice than full fledged Ubuntu. He mentions Puppy, but from what I've heard it is somewhat buggy, and there are a lot of other "tiny" distros he could have tried.

@swjanitor, Just a thought here.... As much as I like and Ubuntu and Xubuntu myself, I'd have to say that something MUCH MUCH simpler than all you've mentioned above could be best used.

As in Going Minimalist. tomsrtbt to test things out, since liveCD boot is questionable BasicLinux --- this can even run from the old legacy floppy disks or from preinstalled DOS

I'd also think that Slackware could work okay, depending on which old Slack version and boot/root options you would use on the K6/2 333MHz CPU with 28MB of EDO DRAM with a claimed "broken BIOS". At least Slack is what I'd try to use on such a Winblow$98-era machine. 2c

I've run systems of this ilk. The 128 MB of RAM is the biggest hurdle. Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux are both great things to try.

I'd go for Debian with either Fluxbox or Xfce. In the "stock" configuration it is quite a bit lighter than Xubuntu.

Slackware with Fluxbox or Xfce would be good, too, except that Slackware is way too KDE-heavy for such old hardware. You'd have to spend some time hunting down apps to replace things that you wouldn't even want to install from the KDE family.

Maybe that lightweight Vector spin http://vectorlinux.com/downloads#light would be the way to go ... I've heard many good things about that.

I thought it was a cool demonstration of how you can make almost anything work, given time and a bit of ingenuity.

Yeah, I thought so too TC. I remember once trying to get Ubuntu + Compiz running on an old Pentium 2 with an Nvidia TNT2 card, just for the kicks. Ubuntu worked fine but I never got Compiz running.

With Feisty I ran XFCE. With the recent Gutsy-Jaunty trip I was just installing command-line stuff because I didn't have time to fight X.org and adding it greatly increases the upgrade time. I may install LXDE or a window manager or just use it headless.

@flufferbeer: I'll check out BasicLinux. Thanks for the tip. The kernel reports BIOS PNP faults and can't set the hardware clock among other problems.

@tuxchick: Some day I'll write up the fun of installing Puppy 3 on a Cyrix 166MHz system with Biostar 8500TVX board and lots of ISA cards (Puppy 4 won't install on it).

@Sander_Marechal: TNT2 doesn't have the necessary functions that Compiz requires. I have set up systems with them (and 3DFX cards as well). About the best thing I got them to do was play Quake 3-based games like Tremulous and Open Area (at minimum settings) on a K6/2 500MHz system.

My worst days with Linux are better than my best days with Windows but sometimes the margin is narrower than I would like.

@jhansonxi: I know now. Back then I thought that a card with hardware T&L should be enough. Now I know it also needs a render-to-texture OGL extension.

I have been running CrunchBang linux on low spec machines (though not as low spec as the author's) and it works very well -- liked it so much that my eee is now running cruncheee. Till a couple of years ago I had a K6/2 300MHz 192MB machine which used to run debian very well.

I ran etch on a P2 300mhz with 64mb RAM, ran OK. Apps were slow to start, and if you started too many it'd kill it, but for basic web browsing it was fine. I used Abiword as the word proc.

I did the same with Etch -- 233 MHz Pentium II and 64 MB RAM. I did the "standard" install and then rolled in X and Fluxbox, then I did the Xfce desktop install, which is surprisingly small given that it includes OpenOffice. And yes, OpenOffice actually did run in those specs. I also used Abiword, but my go-to GUI text editor was Geany. Nobody but me ever seemed to mention it, but the Ted word processor (uses the RTF format) was broken in Etch but now works in Lenny, and that is a great choice for ultra-low-spec hardware.

I've since bumped the RAM on that laptop up to the maximum -- 144 MB. I'm still running OpenBSD 4.2 on the drive and Puppy (2.13 and 4.?). I've been contemplating an OpenBSD reinstall to bring it up to 4.5, but I think the better choice would be to swap out the 3 GB hard drive for a CF card with CF-to-IDE adapter or whatever small dedicated 2.5-inch SSD I could find, and then just run Puppy from live CD.

Gary,

How do you get your invisible tags to work? It has been so embarrassing when they have failed HERE for me recently. I get accused of being a shill for MS. It's untrue, I never shill for free.

YBT

Sorry ... wrong thread ....