Circa 04-06 era ISO for crappy Dell

Whig4life · 02-14-2014, 12:23 PM

I am running on a Dell Dimension 2350 with a Pentium 4 processor and 256 MB of RAM with Lubuntu.

I would very much like a working distro from somewhere between 2004-2006 that would run more smoothly on this machine. Any suggestions?

John VV · 02-14-2014, 01:00 PM

why something that is 10 years out of date with security holes that ARE NOW FIXED !!!!!

CentOS 5.10 will run just fine on that and had still has years of support left

or with a little bit of work
CentOS 6.5
i have ScientificLinux 6.5 running just fine on a computer from 2001
now it dose have 1 gig of ram

or
install knoppix 7.2

harryhaller · 02-14-2014, 01:27 PM

Download an old version of slackware or something similar from an ftp site close to you.

Avoid using firefox - or use an old version. Stay clear of gnome or kde. Apropos security - use the common sense rule - don't use it for banking or on line purchasing or for storing confidential data - otherwise, security is irrelevant - you're not running windows and you don't have anything that can be compromised.

Habitual · 02-14-2014, 01:59 PM

ftp://ftp.slackware.org.uk/slackware/

szboardstretcher · 02-14-2014, 02:02 PM

This is the second time i've got to mention this today.

--
Arch or Archbang. Use openbox. This keeps it to about 20M of memory.

If you do something like use Chromium or Firefox, expect it to eat up quite a bit of ram. I use 'dwb' which is like a browser built on vim that i Love. http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/

At most i consume 80M of memory with dwb, openbox, terminals, wireless and irssi. I havent seen my cpu use go over 20%.

And this is on an old compaq that seriously speed-wise puts any of my exec's macf()ck airs to shame.
--

Habitual · 02-14-2014, 03:47 PM

I think http://connie.slackware.com/ runs on some low resources along these (the OPs) lines without issue, but that's a server Proper.

Low Resource Linux Distributions...
http://www.tuxradar.com/content/what...t-linux-distro
http://www.techradar.com/us/news/sof...distros-683552
slitaz / antix / crunchbang / puppy ...off the top of my head.

frankbell · 02-14-2014, 09:59 PM

Can you put more RAM in it?

I have Dell Dimension 4400 that's slightly newer than that box. I upped it to 4GB RAM and it's currently running Debian Sid like a prince. I'm typing on it right now.

I do use Fluxbox as a window manager, but that's because I like Fluxbox, but I have full KDE and Gnome installs and all the applications run just fine. Newer videos can have some problems, but YouTube works fine.

syg00 · 02-15-2014, 12:08 AM

Depending on personal preference Arch and Slack may be too much work for some. I've had both running X on similar machinery, (but not using current distros - Slack 11 probably). Archbang might be o.k., and might I also add Bodhi to the suggestions (uses Enlightenment and Midori as a browser).

DavidMcCann · 02-15-2014, 11:21 AM

In 256 MB with a P4 you can run AntiX or Bodhi perfectly: they recommend a minimum of 128MB with a P2.