What's a good distro for a old slow Sony Vaio.

dccombs · 03-12-2008, 09:29 PM

I have an old Sony Vaio ( PCG-Z505SX) I use only when I travel on my motorcycle. It's very small and light, perfect for what I use it for. Problem is, its a PII 366 w/192mb RAM. I currently have Windows2000 installed, but it runs very slow with anti-virus & firewall software. It takes 4 minutes to completely start up.

I was hoping to find a lite distro, that will run at a reasonable speed. I am a relative noob, so good hardware detection is a must. I use a Intel PRO/100 pcmcia nic card, and a Linksys wireless card (Broadcom chipset). I assume the Intel card won't be a problem, and would purchase another wifi card if need be to work with a distro I like.

Any advice would be appreciated. I had to order a bootable pcmcia CR ROM on eBay, and it should be here in a couple days. I currently use Mandriva and open SUSE, but I don't think either will run well on this laptop.

{BBI}Nexus{BBI} · 03-12-2008, 10:40 PM

MCNlive is a small mandriva based distro. I use it on my dell dx266 laptop. Check it out here: http://www.mcnlive.org/

woodyjohnson425 · 03-13-2008, 07:01 PM

I just installed Puppy 3.01 on a Gateway Solo PII 233. It's only 98.6M (I did a full install) and I've had no probelms with it (I also has Windoze 2K installed on this laptop and it took forever to boot. The only issue I'm having is finding a driver for my 3Com CCFE575BT PCMCIA card. You can find Puppy here: http://www.puppylinux.org

phpnewb72 · 03-14-2008, 01:15 PM

I second puppy, and would also recommend 'damn small linux' (DSL). which also works very well. both can boot directly from CD or install to the hard drive. http://damnsmalllinux.org/

dccombs · 03-24-2008, 04:21 PM

Thanks for the replies. I looked at DSL & Puppy. I didn't spend much time with either, and my wifi didn't work in either. Then I came across TinyMe Test7. TinyMe is a lite distro based on PCLOS. For a 200mb OS, I think it's fantastic, and I can't wait for it's final release (should be soon!). There is also TinyFlux 1.0 (PCFluxboxOS...uses the fluxbox window manager, whereas TinyMe uses openbox) which I haven't tried yet, but plan to because the stable release has been available since Nov.

I wrote a small review here:
http://tinyme.mypclinuxos.com/forums...p?topic=1708.0