distro for Pentium 100 for net browse & open office?
 

I just asked to give new life to a series of P100 machines with 96 megs of ram, cd rom drive (non-bootable) and 2g hard drives.

Does anyone have recommendations for a distro that would work 'well' for this hardware? - the applications to run would be a web browser (firefox?) and an office suite (word pro and spreadsheet only).

The machines had unlicensed w98se's on them - extremely slow.

Suggestions would be appreciated!

My recommendation is not to try to use those for any desktop, directly. They are more than adequate for use as X-terminals, to run remote desktops and applications from a server (you would basically be using the machine as a dumb terminal). If Windows98 runs slowly on them, imagine trying to run a WinXP superset, like a modern Linux distribution.

The machine is OK as a GUI-less console-mode single user machine or small server (like a print server). Much more than that is painfull. You can't sqeeze blood from a turnip, as they say. :)

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/search.php

google.com/linux

both are your friends :-)

Was actually able to run a browser, a word pro and a spreadsheet on a similar desktop PC (90MHz) with only 64 MB RAM and two 1.2GB hdd. The three+ apps were the 'links' and 'lynx' browsers, the 'pico' editor, and the 'sc' spreadsheet. These are all text-based (TUI) to be run from the command-line only (a.k.a. "console mode", see macemoneta's reply).
Ran these additional TUI apps on the same PC : Midnight Commander (mc), the mp3 player mpg321, the CD-player workbone, the picture-file viewer seejpeg, and some text-based games.
I used the modified Linux distro ZipSlack.
See its site at
http://www.slackware.com/zipslack/
They ran fine.

Key Note: For all these to run decently, absolutely no X-Windows was installed here!

To do this Slackware setup yourself, you would set aside a large partition with fat16/fat32 (basically most of what Win98 was installed with) to copy over the Linux ZipSlack file system. I was able to squeeze a barely-noticeable performance gain out of this PC by additionally creating a swap partition 2.5 times the amount of RAM (i.e., 160MB fdisk type 82), so you'd make a 240MB swap partition (2.5 x 96MB) if you could spare the space. Again, you would be strongly advised to keep X-Windows off this if possible.

macemoneta wrote:
Totally agree.
With my above P90, I eventually just re-formatted one of the drives to make a floppy-bootable firewall. For some good leads on this, see the LQ Firewall Wiki at http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/..._distributions. For the firewall, I left on the 160 swap partition on one of the disks (probably a little wasted space), booted the PC off of the floppy, and used the remaining ~1GB hdd space just to log network packets (as /var). It does its job OK....recommended! :)

-nycace36

Not too long ago, I installed Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 on a Pentium 133 with 64 MB RAM and a 1 GB hard drive. It boots and runs ok, with KDE 1.0. I think it would run on a Pentium 100. You can probably find this distro included in a book if you do a search on Amazon.com or Alibris.com. I found a book with install CD for less than $5.00

More of this one's :twocents:

There are also some more "Minimalist" Linux distros than the above, which should give you some of the basic apps you mentioned above.
One is BasicLinux which has worked great on an old Pentium 75 with 32MB, a 850MB hdd, and no CD-ROM.
Check out its site at http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis...ions/baslinux/
Please note some of these almost-"mandatory" BasicLinux3 (BL3) add-ons from the add-ons page http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis...-ons/index.htm :

zimage.p1 BL3 kernel optimized for old Pentium (pre-MMX)
ssh.tgz Secure shell (replacement for telnet)
sc.tgz Spreadsheet
beep.tgz Plays notes via the PC speaker
mc.tgz Midnight Commander (file manager)
sqlite.tgz Database manager (single-user SQL)
icewm.tgz Window manager (replacement for swm)
abiword.tgz AbiWord (word processor) **SVGA**
links2.tgz Links 2 (graphical browser) **SVGA**
sylpheed.tgz Graphical mail client
xfreecell.tgz Solitaire card game
lincity.tgz Simulated city (management game)
xdigger.tgz Classic puzzle-game
xrunner.tgz Platform game (similar to Lode Runner)
matanza.tgz Multi-player space battle (via network)
smbclien.tgz Client for accessing Windows network shares
sb-bl3.tgz Christof's package for soundcards.
mutt-bl3.tgz Christof's mutt package.

AmigoLinux.
Another Zipslack-type distro that offered this LQ user much more than BL3 on some lower-end laptops without CD-ROMs, was AmigoLinux. AmigoLinux 2.0 runs off of a fat16/32 partition similar to zipslack, and can be fully installed to hard drive.
Very lean and mean!
Its website is http://www.amigolinux.org/
The download section is http://amigolinux.org/download/index.htm
The LQ Amigo Wiki is at http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Amigo_Linux
and the LQ Amigo forum is at
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...?s=&forumid=56

Good Luck! :cool:

-nycace36