133MhzMMx proc, 32mb ram, miniport keyboard, serial mouse, currently running win 98. User friendly would be great. Going to a student with little experience with anythng.
TIA

Your biggest problem will be the small amount of RAM. It is nearly impossible to get any thing graphical running in only 32MB without serious slow-downs. I would use that as text-only machine. You will get way better machines for a small amount of money on ebay or similar sites.

I can kick up the ram. Isn't there a web site with archived older distros? I remember running Susu 6.3 I think with 32 or 64mg ram. Anything other than Puppy or DSL? Any and all suggestions appreciated. Again...
TIA

I would strongly recommend not to use older versions. Those are unsupported and have well known security holes. If you can put in more RAM, at least up to 64 MB, better 128 MB, you can go for some of the smaller distros, like Slitaz or Tinycore, or you install a more common distribution with a lightweight desktop environment or window manager, like Lubuntu, antiX or Vector.

Is it that hard to upgrade? You should be able to assemble much more powerful machine from used parts. Used hardware should be dirt-cheap, and there may be a chance of getting it for free (it depends on your region, though).

Moved: This thread is more suitable in Linux-General and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

Recycle it and pick up a Pentium 4 (or better) with 512mb ram (or more). This will allow you to run a user-friendly distro like Ubuntu, Mint, etc. and shouldn't cost more than $100 (or possibly FREE). Craigslist, Freecycle, Goodwill, friends, relatives, etc.

probably a bit low end for a general purpose machine these days especially with a the big desktop environments requiring quite a bit of ram not to mention a higher end graphics card (which hasn't been mentioned in the previous posts), though you could install a more specialty distribution that serves a purpose such as a firewall or a file server (you need only a bare minimum distribution with NFS and/or samba and a really big hard drive, this can be managed with webmin which i believe doesn't require a huge amount of space or ram to operate)

the file server option works well because the linux kernel overrides the bios when handling drive size/geometry, thus as long as you install using a /boot partition that is in the first 1-500 megs of the drive (and thus can be accessed by BIOS), the drive can be as big as you want it and the Linux kernel will see it and be able to use it. Trust me on this one, i had a 60 gig hard drive running on an 80486 based machine for no other reason then because i could.

Windows 98 may be the best choice still.

BeOS may run but may not make the student happy.

QNX ought to run fine. Still not a happy kid.


Any linux with a gui would be difficult. Might look at slitaz or puppy.

You're not going to get a Linux GUI in 32MB:
Puppy needs 128MB
Antix, Vector Light need 64MB
Tiny Core says "An absolute minimum of RAM is 48mb. Microcore runs with 36mb of ram."

well this piece of antique is not even worth the electricity , not to mention worth using .

my advice: scrap it and get a new box !

you definitely need a new form factor (i.e motherboard) brand new rams (i.e from this day and age) and a cpu (i'd suggest intel atom because it's cheap and low power/low voltage).
you may however re-use the display (CRT i presume) , HDD , CDROM (incase it has one) , FDD , and the computer case with the power supply.

that way you save much more money on the electricity bill (incase saving money is your reason in the first place) , generate much less noise , heat with far greater features and efficiency !

cheers

I'm curious how much power that thing uses.

You actually can get a GUI with linux on 32MB or less.

Turbopup Xtreme-

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=40477

KolibriOS should work for sure as well, but its not a linux distro and I have no idea how difficult it would be to use.

http://www.kolibrios.org/

I'd be more careful than to blindly go making these suggestions...

Pentium 133? Its most likely using a AT case/power supply, not ATX. You cannot use an AT power suppy with an ATX motherboard. Unless its a (rare) AT case with 'punchouts' for an ATX board, its going to be very hard/impossible to fit a ATX motherboard to an AT case (its technically possible to mod a AT case into ATX, its not easy).

A floppy? With Atom? LOL, I dont recall ever seeing an Atom board with a floppy port. I've only seen one or two that have a PATA port (and there is no way that the old P133 is going to be using a SATA HDD or CD/DVD drive)...... Even if the OP did get an Atom with a PATA port, the old P133 HDD is going to be seriously slow. There is a good chance its not even a UDMA HDD.

I'd agree that scraping it isnt that crazy an idea, but scraping it to strip parts for use with a much newer system is crazy.

The technical term is 'sod all'. The CPU would be using less than 5watts at idle, and less than 12watts at full load-

http://www.freeopenbook.com/pc-overc...g/Fly0044.html

I have experience working with old computers like this, and in my opinion Windows 98 is the best choice. Almost any linux distro will run slowly, and the more lightweight distros tend to be less user friendly.

Anyway, I once had Debian 5 running on a pentium laptop with 32MB memory. Installing it was difficult, but it worked alright once I had it set up. I disabled most of the default daemons/services, used IceWM and twm as window managers, and links2 and elinks for web browsing. I ended up using mostly command line stuff since GUI stuff usually used too much memory.
Here's a screenshot:
http://img832.imageshack.us/img832/2...7109029764.png

I still have that old laptop, but it's running a specially configured Windows 9x now. It seems to run a fair deal faster, and I have a PCMCIA wireless LAN adapter working with it (which wouldn't work with Linux).

No. Turbopup, when installed, showed 37MB used. It comes with "large" programs like Seamonkey (total 90MB). Running Dillo took 63MB, while AntiX ran Dillo and Leafpad in just 60.
Kolibri is really a hobby OS, designed to show that you can still write an OS in assembly language!The last time I looked it was quite nice, but there was hardly any software available.