Linux on an old laptop
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Bob_Robertson Jul 29, 2008 9:54 AM EDT |
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. |
| caitlyn Jul 29, 2008 10:19 AM EDT |
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. |
| jdixon Jul 29, 2008 10:25 AM EDT |
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. |
| bigg Jul 29, 2008 10:32 AM EDT |
> 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. |
| Steven_Rosenber Jul 29, 2008 2:14 PM EDT |
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. |
| Steven_Rosenber Jul 29, 2008 4:11 PM EDT |
... 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. |
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