Lightweight fast distro for an old laptop
 

Ok, I'm a slackware/FreeBSD user. I'm looking for a distro for an older laptop (200mhz MMX, 16mb ram, 2 gig HDD). I want something no-frills - I'm not new to Linux/UNIX, and I don't need a lot of handholding.

I will be running X (Fluxbox), too, but I can install that myself - no biggy.

What are your recommendations? I'm on 56k right now, so it's a bit tough to download distros and try them out.

You might give Feather Linux a try:

http://featherlinux.berlios.de/

It is only a 63mb download. It is a live distro that can be installed to the harddrive also. It comes with Fluxbox as the defualt window manager.

Dave

DSL (DamnSmallLinux) its a 50 mb business card sized live cd. Uses the Fluxbox windows manager, and some other completely utilitarian applications.
www.damnsmalllinux.org

They also have a great fourm.

enjoy.

Re: Lightweight fast distro for an old laptop
 

Nothing about a distro but since this is a laptop question you might have wanted to post it in the Laptop and Handheld forum because many people take the option of not have posts in the General forum show up the new posts section and your question might not get seen by as many people.

i use core linux ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/coredistro/ )....

its diffidently not one of em hold your hand distros.... tho even newbies can use it

for me i have to tweak it up so i can use it normally (a few chmod's so i have access to certain places as a normal user, and other thingies depending on how you want things/what you need it for)

feather's the move, m'man. let us know which one you eventually settled on. good luck!

Cool, thanks everybody. Sorry for not posting this in the Laptop forum... I actually don't know why I didn't. I'm not usually this bad when it comes to forums. Eh, sorry :P

I say gentoo, you download only the stuff you need/want and you get nothing you dont add yourself since you dont need handholding I think its a great choice and it will be closer to your bsd roots, however, it will take forever to compile on your laptop, if you can get a laptop ide to normal ide converter you can compile the system on a faster machine then just slap the laptop drive back in

Hello,
I assume you have already made your choice, but I thought I would through in a little personal experience.
Satellite 225cds 16M Ram 133 Mhz, no FDD, 1.4HDD, CDROM,
I tried all of the Distros listed above on this hardware and had no luck. Finally I found an old freebie disk from a linux book/mag with Suse6.2 demo on it...it booted great. Used x and icewm.. with the YAST manager I was able to easily choose what I did and did not want.
I realize it might be difficult to find but I thought I would through that in.
Good luck
Currently running on desktop
Slack 9.1 2.6.5
Knoppix STD
Debian Woody

And I've moved it to Linux-Distributions. Fits here much more than General.