Small Linux for old laptop?
 

Hello,

I'm thinking of putting linux on my latop. I have XP on it right now and it seems to bog down a lot and take a long time to load things and some mp4 videos play really choppy on it. I was hoping that a light weight system might leave more resources for applications and speed it up a bit so I'm looking at smaller linux distrubutions. Right now I'm considering either Puppy or Damn Small.

Are there any particular strengths or weaknesses of each? How do you add extra software? I noticed that DSL doesn't come with Open Office for example, can I just load it?

The laptop is about 8 years old. It's a Compaq Persario, Pentium III, 12G hard drive, 128MB of RAM. I might be able to upgrade the RAM a little though.

Thanks.

I would give AntiX or Vector Lite a try. 128 MB of RAM is not a lot though, you may have problems running Firefox (never mind OpenOffice, which is an utter pig).

CrunchBang Linux may also be good, not sure though, it looks like it may use some heavy applications.

DSL IMHO goes to extremes to be small; Puppy is (also IMHO) kind of problematic because it's single-user, which is dangerous and insecure. Absolute Linux might be better.

If you want *really* light, you could try DeLi Linux, which uses a 2.4 series kernel and can run on a 486 with 16 MB of RAM.

Alternatively, there is the build-your-own method: Install Debian (or Arch, or do a net install of Fedora, etc.), and then add applications:

- ALSA
- The X server and appropriate drivers
- A window manager, conky or gkrellm if necessary for battery monitoring (IceWM has its own battery monitor)
- A light web browser like Kazehakase (ugly but it works).
- Office stuff like Abiword and Evince/epdfview
- Whatever else you think you might need.

If you're new to Linux though, you'd probably want to avoid that.

Thanks for the reply.

I am kind of new to linux. It sounds like building your own might be the way to go but I think it's a little over my head right now.

I have a question though. How does puppy being single user make it insecure?

I'll have to look at some of the other options you mentioned, there's more of them than I thought.

You might look at an xfce or e16 based distro. They should be light weight enough. Puppy is so light weight that you run as root all of the time, which IMHO is a bad idea if you will be connected to the web. May main point is that there are distro's that are light to medium weight without sacrificing as much. It is really the window manager and desktop environment that will use up the most resources, so the distro doesn't matter as much as the desktop environment you use.

A distro may be built around the xfce or e16 (enlightenment) desktops and supply an open office package on the installation CD. How you install it depends on what package manager your distro uses. They will probably have open office prepackaged for you. How to install it depends on the distro. You could also install a package from source, but it probably won't be necessary.

I would suggest a debian minimal lenny net install (unselect everything.) Then you can add individual items as you want and you don't have the problems of having to download applications and compiling programs (and needing a dev environment.)

As far as WM goes, Fluxbox, Blackbox, or Sawfish are real minimal as far as resources go and still remain very functional.

Ratpoison is fun ;)

I want to agree in the strongest possible terms with something implied in jschiwal's post; select the GUI first. KDE and Gnome are 'heavyweights' and while you could get one of them to run in 128 M, it won't be fun and it won't be exciting. (I did once run kde in 196 M, on a laptop, you could never describe it as exciting. OO ran fine, but, back then at least, start up of OO was a bit longwinded so you had to get used to starting it up and just leaving it running, whether you immediately wanted it, or not.)

so, if you chose anything other than

1. a lightweight GUI
2. a ram upgrade

my guess is that you won't like it. Having done that (xfce and enlightenment are good candidates, although there are others) that will make your selection of a distro easier by eliminating most of them.

Note that GUI's are fairly personal things, and just because one is fast enough doesn't mean that you will like it; check out a live CD or two to see whether you think you can get on with the GUI in question.

I think so too.

More RAM would give you a much greater choice for a useful and pleasant linux installation.

You can try the recommended linuxes as live-cds from here.

http://www.livecdlist.com/

To save time, install antiX-base version (latest is antiX-M8-base1, but final will be out soon). This has a meta-package installer app (from sidux) and so you can build up.
antiX-base is about 220MB, includes Xorg, fluxbox, iceweasel, rox-filer, MEPIS utilities and so install is fast and a doddle.

If you can bump the RAM to 192MB or better (the more the merrier), you can run Arch. It is a very fast, full-featured distribution (unlike Puppy and DSL) that can be installed with a very small footprint. Installing Arch is a manual process, requiring the user to do some reading and be prepared to use the command line during the install. Incidentally, it will run at almost "normal speed" on an old 550MHz Celeron laptop I have--complete with a KDE desktop--so I suspect it can run even faster on a more powerful computer.

I wouldn't use KDE on Arch now though, KDE4 is exceedingly sluggish even on my 1.6 GHz laptop with 1.5 GB of RAM.

(Also, I would think Arch could run with 128 MB of RAM? Or does it use more due to everything being optimized -O2?)

It used to run on 128 MB, but the installer was changed to require more RAM perhaps a year ago although I can't recall the reason at the moment. The reason was in the release notes at the time. Anyway, they are now recommending a minimum of 192 MB.

I'm thinking of giving the Debian netinstall a try and choosing lightweight options. That seems to be basically what the other lightweight distributions do anyway.

Is there anything in particular I should consider? I'm not familiar with most of the GUIs, are there any in particular I should consider and how difficult would it be to install different ones to try out? Are there any laptop specific things to look for?

Thanks.

Howdy. If you only have 128MBs of RAM, most linuxes will be slow. If you can boost your system up to 256MBs, you can run Puppy, and if you don't need the box for the Net, I'd recommend it. Puppy runs entirely in RAM, and just uses your harddrive for saving files, so on a Pentium 3, it would be far, far faster than you're used to. I used it to watch a DVD on an old Pentium 3 the first time I booted it.

I'm not an advanced user, but I've been (loosely) rating distros according to how Masonic they are. -From Anti-Masonic, for extremely, almost magically user-friendly interfaces, all the way down to Totally Masonic; a system where you are completely adrift, don't know anything, don't know the secret handshakes, codes, or passwords, and are offered no clues whatsoever (-for instance, any Linux from about 6 years ago). IMHO, Puppy is fairly friendly, non-Masonic I'd say, very nearly intuitive in spots. It has the Fluxbox desktop, which seems nice enough to me. DSL is far more Masonic. I've been using Ubuntu on my desktop, and various Live CDs for about three years, and I'm not up to using DSL yet, it's a little too "bare bones". If you're new to Linux, I'd also recommend AntiX, although it took me a while to figure out that you have to right click on the desktop to get any menus. Some people's "clean interface" is other people's "confusing and geeky". Go figure. Another good small distro is ZenWalk, which uses a very lightweight (XFCE) desktop. I would use it myself if they offered a Dvorak keyboard option.

Hope any of this helps.

I´d suggest Zenwalk because it´s full-featured yet quite sparing on system resources.

I don´t agree that Puppy Linux is insecure; if you activate the firewall it´s quite secure.

If you choose to build from a minimal install, you can find a good tutorial here: http://www.go2linux.org/installing-a...debian-fluxbox You could install LXDE instead of fluxbox, infact, try installing both and see which one you like better.

Let´s know how things turn out, OK?

Thanks for all the advice guys. That looks like a great tutorial, I might try it.

I'm going back to school soon though and I need a laptop for class so I'm kind of waiting to see if I need to keep windows on it. In the meantime, I'm looking around for an old, slow laptop that I can play with.