you could try installing all the gstreamer plugins (the good, the bad and the ugly).

if the hardware really cannot keep up with flash or html5 in-browser video playback, one MUST mention mpv + youtube-dl

• youtube-dl can download almost anything (many more sites than the name suggests). it has a huge community & a dedicated developer team and receives updates constantly. one of the few apps that should be upgraded fast (esp. youtube.com like to change their apis frequently), preferably outside your distro's package management
• mpv automatically integrates youtube-dl if it's present in $PATH, so you can directly stream videos with 'mpv http://site.tld/video_url'
• for those bemoaning the lack of clicky-clicky and shiny-shiny, GUI frontends for mpv exist, e.g. the much beloved smplayer.

so with all 3 compnents in place, you have a great, gui solution for online video streaming that is much, much lighter than playing it back in $Browser.

What a masochist ...
Many years ago I ran one of the early Ubuntu on an 1100 (512M maybe in my case) just to prove I could. Not good, primarily due to the minuscule video RAM that got increased by a Windows driver at boot - the Linux driver didn't at that time. I found that Slackware ran ok, but it was a long time ago.

@ syg00:-

Yep; definitely a masochist, mate!

We've had this 1100 from new, and I've got kinda attached to it - stupid, I know, but it's proven more reliable than many newer machines I've had through my hands. And I'm one of these daft buggers who just loves seeing what old hardware is still capable of.

I'm no 'green warrior', to be sure, but I fail to see the point in chucking stuff that still works 100% in the trash...


Mike.

With you on that.
Still, you might want to retire this hardware to secondary use and grab something newer for gulping streaming media and heavier tasks.

Random thought that I forgot to mention before: I had even tried using TinyCore on this machine, but although it boots really quickly, I couldn’t wrap my brain around the paradigm of how that distribution works and how it is supposed to be installed! :-(

Ah, fair comment. The Dell is located permanently in the front room; I'm a full-time carer, and I use it on the occasions I keep Mama company of an evening.

My main rig is an elderly Compaq Presario desktop, from just before the HP takeover. Dual-core Athlon64 X2, 3 GB RAM, and all sorts of goodies and extras added over the years. It's my main workhorse, and flies with Puppy. That lives in my room, and is where most of my work is done.

I'm a major sci-fi nut, and the Presario spends a lot of its time streaming NetFlix....

Still runs like a dream.....'touch wood'!


Mike.

Modern browsers require pulseaudio. Just the lay of the land. I always avoided it in the olden days, because it chewed up 100MB of RAM, which, when you only have 512MB of RAM, is an issue. Hence the losing battle comment from earlier. For $80-ish you can get a 6 core arm (4x 2GHz 2x 1.5GHz) and 4G's of DDR4 RAM. More than enough to do youtube at whatever resolution your display does and your network speed supports. At least for the next couple of years. Till it takes 1TB of RAM for a browser and 8K displays are the only thing for sale new.

TinyCore is a live run only distribution. It CAN be installed to hard disk, but the recommended install is to just move the img to the HD and do what is called a "frugal" install. Documentation is available and clear on the web site.
The concept is that every run will boot from a read-only image, run from ram like lightning, and only retain what YOU decide will be preserved from one start to the next (preservation folder stuff/settings, installed packages, etc.) It makes it not only very fast, but secure in a way that most are not. It is not for everyone, but a very useful and powerful tool. (I like it, and puppy, a lot!)

I've always wanted to do a puppy linux (boots to / runs from RAM). To chroot into a debian install, replicated to a ramdisk while in puppy. But I've never really had hardware with quite enough RAM. AKA 32GB+, to have 16GB for the puppy+debian ramdisks and 16GB to do useful things. But I'd also want it to be ECC RAM, and those options in the < $500 and < 75W options are few and far between, if such an option exists at all.

The main issue with the OPs setup is that once you're out of RAM, and end up using swap. Insert SLUG, and various other issues. You can change the swappiness value to favor not using swap and gain some relief. But apps are not getting smaller anymore. No longer are we trying to squeeze a full blown linux into a 24MB device (agenda vr3). Which was pretty sweet when we did, a 66MHz mips running as fast as a 400MHz x86. At least in terms of the user experience.

$ echo /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

# echo 20 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

The default is 60 for many *deb distros. Meaning it'll swap even when you don't really need to. Modern linux kind of has /tmp as swap, versus actual swap. For those apps that know that they're pigs and couldn't possibly do it all in RAM. So really you'll gain a lot of speed breaking out various things to their own storage devices, like /tmp. I have the /home/ of one of my users that does a lot of disk I/O on it's own SSD and the difference in the user experience is very noticeable. All of which is moot if you don't have the RAM to run the OS and company to do the things you want to do. Lower resource heavy browsers only go so far.

Ok, so, would you recommend that I use this as a secondary operating system to my current Mint installation. As you know I'm new to Linux and am definitely not prepared for building and installing drivers and the like. Would this hinder my ability to install things such as Java support, Flash support, etc?

rebbi,

I suggest that you try antiX. It is lightweight and has a good rep on LQ forums.

About antiX:
https://antixlinux.com/about/

Download:
https://antixlinux.com/download/

Reviews:
http://www.linuxandubuntu.com/home/a...x-distribution

https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20150810#antix

You may have to accept, at some point, that the hardware is a bit of a dog and no software will completely avoid that. Running very efficient and faster software will help, but limiting what you use the hardware FOR to things it can do well and fast enough may be the longest lasting answer.


If you find that it does not serve you well enough and you need to move to better hardware, you might try something like KOLIBRIOS (an independant operating system entirely written in assembler: it RIPS) to maintain some use out of the old machine.