I'm going to get an old Compaq from a guy at my school. He said it had win95, Pentium processor, 64mb and less ram? 128?, lil harddrive space and someother stuff.

I want to run linux on this machine (win95 uses fat16, slow, old, out of date, sucks). I was reading some reviews and look at pics of DSL (damn small linux), and Puppy Linux, and I'm thinking I'm going to pick DSL.

What do you think?

Just my opinion, but
FreeBSD with a light windows manager like Fluxbox might outperform Linux on that meager box. I have run FreeBSD on a Celeron 400 with 32MB RAM, 3 gig HD, 100MB network card, Sound blaster compat SC, AGP1X 8Meg video integrated, and it is a usable box. Not lightening but usable. BSD doesn't have the stalling problem on a network that Linux has.

Light applications like Sylpheed for an e-mail client, nedit for editor, xterm, aterm for shells, Xcalc, Rox for a file mgr, XCD player, File Roller for archiving, XnView image viewer, Xpdf etc. and you can make that old machine work usably with X and a windows mgr with most Linux distros.

Lots of distro choices, just stay light on the WMs and apps. I see that DSL has Dillo. Thats a great fast little browser but it doesn't render pages correctly. Firefox won't run real fast on a P133 type.

Good luck, I like to put those old machines back into service too.

tekk is right- go light on the window manager- icewm, fluxbox, blackbox yadda yadda. (ice wm is more conversion friendly (read- I like it) though some swear by fluxbox, others swear at it)

A lite linux light DSL is a good choice, but hey, any linux (stripped down) would be good- debian, slackware yadda yadda.

titanium_geek

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