Slackware suited for REALLY old computer?
 

I have a P1 133 MhZ with a small amount of ram and i want to run some distro with X. Would slackware be suited for this task? Is it not too hard to use?

How much is a small amount of RAM ?

I ran slackware 9.1 on a P133 with 24Mb of ram (upgraded to 28), 700Mb HD

It had an email server, apache 2, mysql, and a few more serveces. It ran well, although php did slow it down a bit.

As long as you stick to CLI and don't use any desktop environment on it, you should be fine.

In the corner of my office, there is a Slackware server, running along, just fine. It's main purpose is to be a file/email/web server. And it does that job very well. Rarely do I have to go into it, but when I do, I use an xterm to do any touch-up/configuration. I do have X windowing on it. But I do not have desktop environments (read gnome/KDE et al) on it. I do have the simpler window clients.

This server is an old, very old, Toshiba laptop. Pent-133 with only 16 Megs of RAM. The original HD died, a few years back, and I replaced it with one that is five times larger (couldn't find anything as small as the original disk was.)

I have been toying with the idea to down that sucker and put Slackware 10.0 on it. But I just love the uptime that it has been showing and I hate to save off all my files (outside of the occasional archiving) and re-installing them after I upgrade. Maybe one day.....

Incidentally, it is running Slackware 7.1, with certain portions updated to keep it nice and tight.

Check these two URLs out:

http://www.netcraft.com/whats?host=www.jcon.com

http://www.jcon.com

Vector Linux
 

You also might want to check out VectorLinux. It's based off Slackware, but even more lightweight and one of its aims is bringing life back to older machines (and being super fast on newer ones). In my own experience, Vector's compatibility with Slackware packages is really good, so I'd highly recommend giving it a try. You might also want to check out Mad Penguin's review of the latest version, VectorLinux 4.3.

I guess it's a bit blasphemous in this forum but although I do *now* use slackware, my old toshiba 4900CT with a P75, 16MB ram and 800MB hdd has been a reliable little debian box all this year. It was one of my first proper linux projects.

I chose debian because I was following an installation on a similar laptop I saw on the web. As it turns out, debian is great because you can do a minimal install off about four floppies and then have a *very* clean system to download more packages from using apt-get.

I installed X and fluxbox and used a browser called dillo which all worked great!

--Chuck

The minimum requirement is Pentium 500 MHz so this rules me out. There is also an English page that one can get to by cliking on the main screen English Logo.

a good rule of thumb, in reality, mimimum requirements don't matter in linux.

You probably could run slackware on that machine. Probably not 10, but maybe 9. You most certainly could not run KDe or GNOME, but you might get away with fluxbox.

Posted under wrong thread IN ERROR. Please ignore the above.

Vijay

I have slackware 10 running on a Pentium 233mmx. I did have to upgrade the ram (from 32 to 96). Hard drive space is a bit tight w/ only 2 gigs, but it fits fine without KDE and Gnome. Fluxbox is no problem at all. After partitioning /swap, I had about 1.6 gigs, and I've used up about 1.2. I'm sure the install could have been scaled down a quite bit, but I chose to do the full install minus KDE and Gnome to avoid dependency issues (and headaches :D). With some research, I could have probably gotten rid of a lot more than just KDE and Gnome...and that's next on my list of things to do. The 400 or so megs of space left on my drive is not going to last very long.:D

come on
you guys are amateurs :P
i installed slack ( i think 9? 9.1?) on a 486/66 with 20 mb ram
i put in a 3.2 gig hd though
took me over 2 days to compile center-icq!(console multiprotocol im client)
haha
133mhz is quite sufficient
i assume you have like at least 16mb ram

i have slack 10 on 100mhz amd-k5 with 32mbram.

it runs fine.

lol@these old systems running slack 10 fine....ahh the joys of linux.

I once succesfully installed Slackware 7.1 using floppies on a Toshiba T1950CT with 8MB RAM, 200MB HDD and Intel 486 40Mhz cpu
It didn't run X though, but I did install a Java SDK on it for a laugh (can't recall which version, but older one obviously). If my memory serves me well, it took over half an hour to compile the classic "hello world" program...or was it to run the program? I forget ;-)

Slackware Current (about a month old) on a 50mhz i486 laptop with 4mb of ram.

Hardware requirements don't mean a thing.