K.Mandla's lowest-spec machine as of 2011 (when he discontinued the blog) was a Thinkpad X60s with dual-core processor and 3gb ram. I agree with 273 that using an old clunker PC as an always-on jukebox is a colossal environmental "fail." You probably already have a smartphone in your pocket that is a far superior jukebox, or if not, you can get a cheap mp3 player for under $20 that consumes maybe 0.01% of the power compared to a tower-style PC.

Apologies if I have ever given offense with my frequent mantra of "upgrade your hardware." My career in IT is guided by my belief that the single most valuable resource we have in this world is human time/productivity. Therefore when faced with a problem with two solutions, one which is free (but time-consuming, disruptive, and will give sub-optimal results), and another which carries a price tag (but is quick, effortless, and will give good performance), I will unflinchingly recommend the more expensive solution every time. By doing so, I mean no disrespect to LQ members who enjoy the DIY challenge of rehabilitating old hardware, nor do I want to give the impression I don't care about the environment. Rather, when I suggest to a poster "I think you should upgrade your hardware for a good experience with modern 2013 Linux" my intention is to show respect to the person asking the question, by placing highest value on their time.

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I personally try never to take or imply offense but think if something is debatable is probably not worth debating ; one of many human ironies, at lest until Elysium for all!

Thanks snowpine for explaining it so well.
I don't mean that everyone ought to throw machines out after some arbitrary period of time but more that there are severe downsides to running old kit and doing so isn't as environmentally or pocket friendly as one might assume.
Wanting to run an older machine as a hobby or having to run an old machine due to shortages in the part of the world you live in is, of course, understandable. I mean no disrespect to anybody in either of those categories.

I internally debated whether or not to respond to this point. You are absolutely correct; the only advice/perspective I can give is that of a middle-class, white, male, American IT professional. However, rather than add a misleading and patronizing disclaimer to all my posts ("If by accident of birth you are American, then I recommend the optimum solution X. If you are a foreigner, then I'm afraid you must suffer with the non-optimum solution Y.") how about if I just share my experience/opinion, and those from different socio-economic-political-geographic backgrounds can share their experience/opinions, and we will respect each other?

If you live in the US and are on a tight budget, then your best bet for upgrading hardware is to make contact with local businesses who are migrating from Windows XP to newer Windows versions. Linux-only users may not be aware that Windows XP is going "end of life" in April 2014. Many businesses find it is more time/resource/money efficient to discard the XP machines and purchase new hardware, as opposed to attempting an upgrade-in-place on aging hardware. Every week, I recycle my body weight (or more) in Windows XP machines, some of which are reasonably capable dual-core machines with 1-2gb RAM. These higher-end XP machines are excellent candidates for a lightweight Linux in my opinion. (Disclaimer: I cannot say from personal experience how businesses in other countries are planning to deal with XP end-of-life.)

That he now has newer machines doesn't negate the use-cases for older machines. Also, you asked about a possible use-case for a laptop with 64MB of RAM, not an "old clunker" "tower-style PC". Jukeboxes are usually not portable systems, neither your smartphone (which you will usually take with you) nor an mp3 player (also usually something you don't leave at home, also does in that price-range not come with the options of a good mediaplayer software) are valid options here.

Of course respecting each other is the first thing to do. But always recommending a hardware upgrade as the only valid option is not very respectful to those that simply can't follow that advice.

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You are absolutely right; I was flipping back and forth between an old-laptop thread and an old-tower thread, and I got mixed up.

Unless jsowden explicitly says "I am on a tight budget and simply can't upgrade my hardware," I do not know the project has that constraint; I am not a mindreader.

When I express an opinion, I am not invalidating or disrespecting the opinions of other LQ users (I shouldn't have to add that disclaimer), merely adding my voice to the chorus and saying what *I* would do in that situation.

jsowden, you may be interested in this:

It is a Linux distro with a "russian dolls system" that senses the available memory and adapts to the available resources, sounds very cool! (I have not tested it on less than 256mb personally.) With your 64mb you should get at least a text mode system, possibly more once you have installed to the hard drive and created a swap partition.

http://www.slitaz.org/en/doc/release...lnotes.en.html

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Not at all.

A 633Mhz AMD/Intel is a whole order of magnitude faster than a 486, and about 3 times faster than any 586. That is just on CPU power alone. It will also have much more RAM than any 486 I've run across, and almost any 586. Even if its just 128MB.

Yes. What one person might consider uselessly slow, others may consider fast enough.

IMO wanting to install a linux just because there are boxxes around that may run with it is great if you want to just poke around with linux....its not going to turn an old 486/586 into system that can be used like a newer system.

Because people often take media payers with them doesnt mean they have to. How much difference is there between a elderly laptop sitting somewhere, and a media player?

sure, the 'feature set' on a cheap media player isnt great, most of them will only play .mp3s, sometimes .wav and .wma. But have you tried playing MP3s on a 486 system? Its...not great. Besides that, most 486s up to the end of the intel 586s only have small HDDs. For $10 you can find 4GB mp3 players, and thats as much HDD space as I expect most 586s to have. $15 can get you 8GB, far more than you'll get with most 586s.

hi

http://tinycorelinux.net/overview.html#require

thats 48 megs

ok now I am not sure if you need an optical drive?

tinycore's coreplus....choose the 32 bit pls
is an isohybrid

personally I used to use TC on a stick (still have it) but the 4.7.7. series offers more window managers so consider doing an usb install

change sdb to something else if you have more than one hd

http://tinycorelinux.net/4.x/x86/rel...Plus-4.7.7.iso

bc3680d7d5efa23886205129740001a2 CorePlus-4.7.7.iso

just to state the bleeding obvious
by installing to usb stick you can try out the distro without mucking up your internal hard drive
usb will be slower but you know that eh?

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