Best Distro for a SLOW Computer

JRW160 · 05-18-2004, 05:31 PM

I am trying to help my roommate out and install linux on his laptop so he can at least browse webpages and stuff. The laptop is a Pentium MMX 166MHz with 32MB RAM and a 2GB HD. What distro would be best for this machine. It had windows 98 on it, and was pretty much useless. Is there any distro with a graphical environent and pretty low overhead? My roommate knows nothing about linux or computers, so it needs to be fairly easy to use.

Poetics · 05-18-2004, 05:37 PM

Take a look at some of the "alternative" Window Managers out there (meaning other than KDE or Gnome, which are resource-heavy) -- Fluxbox, et cetera. They may be exactly what you need.

I generally recommend Slackware for any system, but especially for lower-end systems with little processing power under the hood. Most distros should be fine, however, as long as you're careful on the WM selection.

-- Poetics

Tinkster · 05-18-2004, 05:37 PM

If you're not into LFS I'd suggest something
Slack based, preferably version 7 (or there
abouts) with X11 3.3.x and Ice or fvwm2
as WM....

Cheers,
Tink

Inhibit · 05-19-2004, 10:04 AM

Mandrake, oddly, works allright on a small footprint machine (my P90 IBM laptop) running ICEWM, allthough XFCE4 would probably be better. Alternatively you can look into peanut linux, damn small linux, and the like.

TheFirefly · 05-19-2004, 10:18 AM

If you go to the slacware site there is also zip slack a smaller installation of slackware, perhaps you could check that out

EDIT: Details here http://www.slackware.com/zipslack/

wrat · 05-19-2004, 12:07 PM

I have a p200 with 48mg ram and dsl from the cd runs quite well..Im working on vector 3.0 as well...vector is slack based..dsl is debian/knoppix