What is the best Distro for old Dell CP laptop? (Pentium 233)
 

Anyone have an opinion for the best distro to use on my Dell CP laptop? It is a Pentium 233 Mhz and will be lightly used by the kids to surf the net and email. Thanks in advance for your advice :D

Puppy Linux Note that with Puppy there is the main version and many community created "Puplets" that are customized.

There are other small and light distros for older hardware, but in my experience, Puppy is the easiest to get up an running.

BTW, how much RAM does your system have?

Tkx Claudius :-)

It is running 128MB of ram. I just downloaded Fedora 10 Live and this thing chokes on the kernel. Something about a processor instruction missing. I have ran Feather Linux and Knopix on a usb drive with no problem but felt it was time to get XP off the drive on this old dude and make Linux perm ;-)

I will give Puppy a try!

As Intel progressed from 386 to 486, 586, etc they added the occasional new instruction to the architecture. Use software compiled for a 386 and it will work on any CPU in the series.

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Steve Stites

I just downloaded the Fedora 10 Live iso. I will go back and see if there is a 386 flavor. Thx!

Try reading through this thread. This will really help you out. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-help.-686383/

Fedora if memory serves is build for i686 architecture, which is the Pentium Pro and newer.

Personally I love Slackware on old systems like that. Slackware is built for i486 arch.

Thanks! What a great resource ;-)

Pentium 233 MMX is an i586 architecture. Pentium II 350 is an i686 architecture.

Just so you know.

Slackware 10.2 will run just fine on it. You can upgrade it to a newer 2.4 version kernel.
I'd avoid a 2.6 kernel on the Pentium II.
The old Xfree86 that comes with it has great support for old S3 chip sets. Patrick V. includes
the voodoo drivers on the cd's as well under extra.

I have a 233 and I tried a few distributions.
Ubuntu: failed, not enough ram to load the ramdisk.
Ubuntu Alternate: I don't think i could get that working either.
Slackware 12.0: Ran ok command-line, Xorg 4.2 the video drivers weren't supported (S3/3DFX) defaults to vga 320x200
Slackware 12.1: Way to slow, the kernel was crippling the entire system. Never tired it with Xorg 4.3
knoppix std: Worked fine.

Don't confuse Pentium and Pentium 2 people!

If the processor is a Pentium II 233MHz, then it is P6 (i686) architecture.
If the processors is a Pentium (MMX) 233MHz, then it is P5 (i586) architecture.

mpl states that he has a Pentium processor.

Oh, and now that I'm thinking about it, kernel 2.6 does not run well on procs that old in my experience.

I just remembered, mine's a Pentium 233 MMX.

Vector linux lite worked rite out of the box,chose the defaulted values and everything ran fine. good luck

I have two Latitude CP/x PIII 350MHz 128MB RAM running Slackware 12.0 w/o no speed or compatibility problems at all. One of the machines, in fact, is my web server (see link below).

These machines have the ATI 3D Rage Mobility video chipset, which runs great on X using the radeon driver. Direct Rendering works, but 3D performance sucks.