Hey guys,

I read the inital sticky in the "General" forum and based on it I think this section is the best for my question.

I got an old Dell box the other day just given to me and I'm talking like mid 90's old.

Dell Dimension
Pentium 2
450 mhz
128 mb of RAM
18 gig HD

Really...all I can tell by lookin at it fast.

Anyways, while I have it I was wondering what the best Linux Distro would be for this type of slow P.O.S. machine. I started it up and the previous user had Windows XP which was barely CRAWLING on the machine.

I honestly know nothing about linux (never touched a distro in my life) so I would need something basic, with a small footprint in memory, but still pretty user friendly. I consider myself a powerful PC user so I would feel comfortable in a somewhat advanced distro....

Im really just looking for something lightweight that wont bog the machine down.

Any suggestions would be GREAT and thanks so much in advance.

There's many that will work, that's really a pretty snappy machine. Xubuntu, Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux are just a few.

Personally, I'd go a little more difficult and install a base Debian system (text only) and then install just the software I wanted. I have a machine that runs a stripped down KDE, (one of the two bloated desktops) and it only used 55MB RAM. I used to have it running on a Celeron 400MHz w/ 256MB RAM.

Here's a recent article from Linux.com recommending DeliLinux as a light distro done right. I haven't tried it, but as soon as I get my hands on a small, old machine I will. First installs tend to be a bit tricky. You're in a foreign land and you don't know the language. So whatever you wind up trying to install, come back for help.

haha it starts out pretty foreign with these .iso's

I'm D/ling the DeLi Distro as we speak...

Anyone know where I can find a good tutorial on installing the .iso through a LAN as opposed to burning it to CD?

To be quite honest, those specs aren't as bad as some I have seen. I have seen people wanting lightweight distros on machines with half the power of yours.

My first recommendation would be Puppy since I have been using it now for a little while. Damn Small Linux would be a good choice as well. Both are pretty easy to use and I think you'll be amazed at how quick they run on that system. One little piece of info though...try and dig up what resolutions your video card and/or monitor supports as you may need this info when doing installs. I know Puppy prompts for it when it sets up Xorg...not too sure about Damn Small Linux though.

Really though with those specs, you could run something a little more than the lightweight guys like Puppy and Damn Small. You could probably pick any distro you want and install it, just make sure and use a somewhat lightweight window manager such as fluxbox. I'd avoid KDE and Gnome window managers on that system just b/c it'll be about as fast as XP is now.

Oh yeah, I should mention that Puppy, Damn Small, AND Xubuntu are live CDs so that way you could test em out before you install em to the hard drive. So if you want, download all 3 and pick which one you like best.

Vector Linux 4.3
http://www.vectorlinux.com/

DSL
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Puppy Linux
http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_id=3

Slackware
http://www.slackware.com/

BeaFanatIX
http://bea.cabarel.com/

Elive:
http://www.elivecd.org/

Deli
http://delili.lens.hl-users.com/

Xubuntu 6.10.

I installed it on a 600mhz Pentium II about 2 weeks ago, and it works very well. I don't know how true it is, but I've read the Xfce desktop environment, is "lighter" than Gnome or KDE, so its easier for older PC's.

I took that info in to account when I upgraded my laptop(1ghz, 768mb RAM, 64mb dedicated to video, 25gig hard drive)...

Xubuntu 6.10 has ran flawless.

IGF

NO. With that box he can easily run VL 5.1 and some of our members are running 5.8 (the latest & greatest of the Vector Linux releases) on boxes with lower specs. It will probably be hard to get support for 4.3. I recommend trying 5.8 if you decide to go with VL, as none of the packagers seem to be building for 5.1 anymore.

[edit]
By the way, don't use Firefox, it will eat your memory and then start eating your swap partition. Use some lighter browser instead. Some people seem to prefer Opera on boxes that are low on resources.
[/edit]

I've a similar configuration:

Pentium II 350Mhz
RAM 196Mb
ATI Rage video card

I would like to install Debian or Debian-based distro. Xubuntu sounds good. Debian can be difficult? I'm not new to Linux, but still a newbie

Nik

The one thing I think Xubuntu(and the *buntus in general) have on most other distros, is its great package manager. Xubuntu/Ubuntu uses Synaptic, and it really makes installing most software as simple as 3-4 clicks. If you want to install another program, and it has a repository, all you have to do is add that repo to your package manager, update, and then search for the software and install it.

Bout as easy as it gets..

Here's a link to the Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy FAQ. It will go a long way to helping you with an Xubuntu setup.
http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Edgy

Edit: Do you plan to put the above computer online?(You will need internet access to take advantage of updates, etc..) If so, do you plan on using dial up, or using an Ethernet card to connect to a router/switch to share a high speed connection. Some dial up modems are kinda funky in Linux. Ethernet connections, provided it recognizes your card, should be pretty simple to set up.

IGF

You've actually got plenty there to work with. I installed Damn Small linux on an old computer that I found on the side of the road (somebody put it out to be picked up by the trash man).
233 Mhz proc, 32 MB RAM, and 8 GB HDD. If you do a hard-drive install of DSL, and then crank down the graphics, and make sure to disable any services and drivers, etc, that you do not use, you can actually get it going to a reasonable speed. This one does web surfing, GAIM, text editing, etc. Just fine. My friend likes to play Doom on it. So anyway my point is that you have plenty of hardware to work with, and while you could install alot of bigger distros with that hardware setup, I'd go with Xubuntu or Damn Small Linux, just so you could get the best performance possible. The Xubuntu web site has an alternate iso you can use for low-end machines, too. Good luck with it!

I'd use arch linux. Because it boots very fast, runs fast, is simple to manage trough a couple of text files, great package manager and you don't need any special distro for old computers on your pentium2 with 128MB ram. I'd not use deli linux, dsl or anything like that because they're hard to update and don't have a lot of software available (if you enable apt-get in dsl you can better get debian to start with)... Debian testing is also good, vector linux probably too.

The thing I'd be careful about is to choose fast light applications. Here's my preferred list:

windowmanager: icewm with silverxp theme (fast and great keyboard support)
browser: opera (console: elinks)
chatting: irssi + bitlbee server for msn
videos: mplayer
music: xmms (console ncmpc)
terminal: aterm
file manager: emelfm (console mc)
pdf: xpdf
ms word like app: abiword
editor: nedit, nano and vim
ftp: lftp

http://users.skynet.be/six/gpure/tech/lightdesktop.html

http://users.skynet.be/six/gpure/tech/linux/apps.html