would appreciate what distro to install

[ejt]

I have an old Dell Inspiron 7000, pentium II with a 4.52gb HD and 64mb ram laptop. Are there any linux os that anyone would recommend installing or would the frustrations out weight the benefits? I have been using kubuntu for almost 2 years but am not much of an experimenter, just a user to get things done. I can use the CLI marginally if required.

[Odisej]

Re: would appreciate what distro to install

Much depends on expectations. The trick is to use a lightweight desktop environment such as XFCE or even lighter. Since you are a fan of ubuntu why not try xubuntu?

Otherwise Arch Linux is a good solution too but it takes a while to set it up. Puppy Linux may also be to your liking.

Regards,

odisej

[Troberg]

Re: would appreciate what distro to install

I think the big problem will be the RAM, I don't think any modern distro will run a desktop well with that little memory. On the other hand, if you can get your hand on some more RAM, which you can probably get for free if you have any contacts with sysadmins with a box of "good things to keep that I'll probably never use", it will probably run nicely. Just watch out so you don't fill the disk, so choose a distro with a small disk footprint.

[Snowhog]

Re: would appreciate what distro to install

DSL (Damn Small Linux)

[MoonRise]

Re: would appreciate what distro to install

I have an Old Dell Inspiron 3800, Celeron 600MHz laptop that I have Xubuntu 9.10 on. Runs great! No problems an no complaints.

[askrieger]

Re: would appreciate what distro to install

I can weakly vouch for Puppy (I tried it a few years ago), and Xubuntu (I believe my son-in-law was using it all weekend, while he was here for Thanksgiving), but I have no idea what the minimum requirements are for either distro. Unless you want to store your movie collection on your laptop, I suspect that 4.5 gigabytes will probably provide enough disk space, but I'm not sure about the RAM.

[dibl]

Re: would appreciate what distro to install

DSL, as said by Snowhog, or Slax.

I wouldn't try Kubuntu or Ubuntu -- either one will soon fill up the 4.5GB drive, and I doubt you've got the RAM to run them anyway.

[arochester]

Re: would appreciate what distro to install

Puppy isn't as small as it used to be. It needs 128Mb unless you install an older version that just needs 64Mb. From the Puppy website: RAM : 128 MB physical RAM for releases since version 1.0.2 or failing that a Linux swap file and/or swap partition is required for all included applications to run; 64 MB for releases previous to 1.0.2

Xubuntu. From the Xubuntu website: Once installed, Xubuntu can run with starting from 192 (or even just 128) MB RAM, but it is strongly recommended to have at least 256 MB RAM.

Also look at Slitaz . http://www.slitaz.org/en/

[MoonRise]

Re: would appreciate what distro to install

Puppy isn't as small as it used to be. It needs 128Mb unless you install an older version that just needs 64Mb. From the Puppy website: RAM : 128 MB physical RAM for releases since version 1.0.2 or failing that a Linux swap file and/or swap partition is required for all included applications to run; 64 MB for releases previous to 1.0.2

Xubuntu. From the Xubuntu website: Once installed, Xubuntu can run with starting from 192 (or even just 128) MB RAM, but it is strongly recommended to have at least 256 MB RAM.

Also look at Slitaz . http://www.slitaz.org/en/

I can say that the laptop I mentioned above does have 256MB RAM (MAXed out man! ) and has a 40GB HD. I've used Puppy on it as well. Either Xubuntu or Puppy I believe are good choices. I've never used DSL, so I can't say for that.

[Ole Juul]

Re: would appreciate what distro to install

I have a laptop with a P133 and 64MB ram. It is currently running DSL 3.3 RC3. Everything works normally there.

One thing that people run into when using smaller amounts of Ram is the installation usually requires more RAM than it does to run the programs. There are clever ways around that. However, 64MB is actually quite a lot, just not for eye candy. As you no doubt can see by now, DSL is a good choice for minimal frustration, but what some people also do with older machines is use older distributions. I've seen old versions of Red Hat being effective on vintage machinery.

PS: Slax has a modular approach which is aimed at lower resources, but DSL is easy out of the box. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Puppy would run on that machine too.

[askrieger]

Re: would appreciate what distro to install

Checkout this article at distrowatch. It's a review of Slitaz which discusses some of the others and the general considerations regarding compact distros. It would appear that (as of last year) Slitaz is looking pretty good.

[Ole Juul]

Re: would appreciate what distro to install

Nice. I'm downloading it as I'm writing this and by the time I hit the submit button it looks like it's going to be half way done! Actually there it is now... hold my calls.

[arochester]

Re: would appreciate what distro to install

For anyone with time on their hands to experiment there is also Tiny Core Linux. http://tinycorelinux.com/

It says on the site:
"Tiny Core Linux is a very small (10 MB) minimal Linux GUI Desktop" and "It is not a complete desktop nor is all hardware completely supported"

Just don't expect things to work out-of-the-box. Wireless does not look like a strong point, but reading the forum some people do get it to work.

[arochester]

Re: would appreciate what distro to install

DeLi Linux 0.8.0, a light-weight desktop distribution designed for computers with as little as 32 MB of RAM

http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=04919