Distro of choice for Pentium laptop?

chipfiev · 11-05-2003, 04:40 PM

I've got a Dell Latitude CP (Pentium 233, 128MB, 4GB disk) that I would like to run Linux on...you know, a little websurfing here, some email there, playing with wireless networking...

I've used linux before (installed Slackware a few years ago, have played with RH 9.0 a bit) but I'm not an expert. I know Solaris pretty well, so I am reasonably well versed in UNIX, but not many different distros.

Which distro would be best? I was going to try Fedora, but the system requirements for graphical use scared me off. I'm going to want to run X, but I don't want to get bogged down with overhead since the machine is not too speedy and it's not exactly high in RAM.

Thoughts?

slakmagik · 11-05-2003, 04:53 PM

I don't know anything about hardware support for laptops, so that may be an issue. By bare specs, Slack should be good. You've tried that before, you say, so that should be a bonus, unless you didn't like it. Might try Vector, which is an even lighter Slack-based distro that should do great on that hardware.

chipfiev · 11-05-2003, 09:53 PM

Vector? I haven't even heard of that one. Small and light are good. One of the things that has bugged me most about Red Hat is the size - a small install is still very large.

slakmagik · 11-05-2003, 10:11 PM

http://www.vectorlinux.com/

Yep. I ran 3.1 or something on a P100 from 1995 with an 812 MB hard drive and 32 MB RAM for awhile. Even Vector pushed *that* hardware and it didn't much like my S3 video or lucent winmodem but, otherwise, it was pretty nice. (And the hardware issues may have been my fault, too.) I think 4.0 has just come out and has gotten good reviews. It's not like some gimmicked-up micro distro that feels crippled, but there's also no bloat to speak of. I suppose ZipSlack is also an option if you've got a DOS partition and don't mind a umsdos filesystem - it seemed to do even better on that box than Vector. And a regular Slack is possible.

chipfiev · 11-06-2003, 09:02 AM

Vector sounds exactly like what I'm looking for. I think I'll give it a try. And, if I'm not happy, there's always Slack.

Thanks.

slakmagik · 11-06-2003, 10:52 AM

Sure thing.

slightcrazed · 11-06-2003, 02:22 PM

A basic slackware install with X is very possible on that machine. It might take a litte tweaking, but it can happen.

Check this out.... slack on a 486 laptop with 4MB of RAM w/ X......no joke.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=88991

slight