YABDT (Yet Another Best Distro Thread)

Sorry to do this, but I must pick your brains.

Mom wants a computer and figures that I must have something that I can just "give" her. Well, I do, but it's a little on the old side. The PC in question is a P200 with 32MB RAM, 2GB HDD, floppy, cd-rom, nic, etc. She's looking for something that will allow her to browse the internet and that's about it. I'll have to scrounge up a modem for this box and I'll see if I can boost the RAM to 64MB, but I don't want to stick too much money in it as I could probablly get something newer/faster for less than $200 off eBay or similar.

A couple of years ago, I probablly would have just stuck Win98 on the box, made an image, and let her have at it. Any problems OS-wise could have been fixed in about 10 mins by restoring the image. These days, I'm worried that her PC will get pwn3d so fast that I'll be fixing it constantly. I could install NT4 and lock it down, but that will realistically require 64 MB to run. Win2k/XP are both right out because of performance issues.

Alternatively, I am thinking that I could install some version of Linux (please hold the suggestions of xBSD as I really don't feel confortable supporting that for my mom). What I'm looking for is a distro that is fairly lightweight, comes with a desktop enviroment that is geared towards older/lower performance boxes and has decent modem support. Also, recommendations on some of the more light weight browsers that are available would be nice.

From what mom has told me, I think she's mainly looking to surf country music websites, drool over pictures of Toby Keith (shudder), and maybe download/stream some music.

Thanks,

Phishtrader

I used to run Red Hat 7.3 on PII 233 MHz with 64MB of RAM and it worked quite well. It's a tad out of date, but would probably be Ok for web browsing and other basic needs.

Originally posted by AlexV I used to run Red Hat 7.3 on PII 233 MHz with 64MB of RAM and it worked quite well. It's a tad out of date, but would probably be Ok for web browsing and other basic needs.

Would there be any security issues for a relatively locked down system on dialup internet access? I wouldn't be running anything in the way of servers.

Originally posted by phishtrader Would there be any security issues for a relatively locked down system on dialup internet access? I wouldn't be running anything in the way of servers.

Possibly, but I doubt it. Certainly no worse than Windows XP. Most script kiddie cracker-wannabes are targeting MS boxes anyway. Use a firewall and I'm sure you'll be fine

I have slackware 10 running on a k6-2 233 for my mother. it runs fairly well with xfce, which is the nicest lightweight DE for a mother. fluxbox would probably do better, but it's a little rough to configure. I had to upgrade to a newer version of xfce, as the one it came with didn't have a decent app-menu. using a newer release will probably fix that issue for you. and it's certainly newer than redhat 7.3

Hello,
I suggest Slackware with Fluxbox. It runs well on older systems and with flux as a WM, you won't see any slow downs.

I'm not sure what "rough to configure" means, just edit ~/.fluxbox/menu for the context menu.
She could use firefox for surfing and xmms for streaming the music online.

Some say slack is difficult to install, if you've never done it. I say it's different, not difficult.

XFCE might work if she wants a menu to click on and pretty to icons. Flux is pure simplicity though.

GL, I'd like to move some of my family over, but I don't think they have the initaitve to learn a new OS.
-Jason

I'd also recommend Slack with Fluxbox. Very lightweight. As far as configuring Fluxbox menu a simple "fluxbox-generate_menu" will do the trick. Nothing rough to configure about that.

Another option, if you're up to it, is just running knoppix, or another live-cd based distro such as Suse... she definitely couldn't screw that up. Also, if you wanted to just let her use your box, or another computer...shared or whatever, you could just have her put that cd in whenever she starts it up.

I use Slackware with Blackbox, I find it excellent, easy to configure, easy to use and very fast.

Originally posted by stringstud Another option, if you're up to it, is just running knoppix, or another live-cd based distro such as Suse... she definitely couldn't screw that up. Also, if you wanted to just let her use your box, or another computer...shared or whatever, you could just have her put that cd in whenever she starts it up.

I thought about that too. I would have to set up a /home on the harddrive to store permanant settings. On the downside, it would make an already slow (by today's standards) box even slower. I don't live with my mom and while I don't mind going over to visit with her and the cats her cooking isn't good enough to make me want to stop by that often. I think a reasonablly locked down box, especially if it is a platform that's more or less immune to the usually bunch of trojans, viruses, spyware, etc, should remain pretty clean.

There are a lot of suggestions for Slackware which I'm not really familiar with. Is Slackware a source-based distro? Having to compile a lot of extra software might become a bit of drag on P200 (although I would have killed for one around 1996), is there a package manager available? What about precompiled binaries?

Fortunately, nobody has recommended Gentoo yet. . . .

I see several votes for Slackware and Knoppix. The problem Slackware + Fluxbox or XFCE is that they aren't exactly the most -- "Mom Friendly" -- environments in the *nix world. The trouble with Knoppix is that you'll never get it running in 64MB of RAM.

KDE on Red Hat 7.3 is a fairly Windows-like desktop that runs great in 64MB. If you worried about security, check out the Fedora Legacy Project. They're still providing updates for 7.3.

[Disclaimer: I'm a die-hard GNOME user now, but back when Red Hat 7.3 came out, KDE had the edge]

by rough to configure I mean for someone who doesn't know what to do with a text editor. especially when they're likely to be the main user of the computer. I say xfce is less rough to configure because it has a panel that is fairly straight-forward where fluxbox simply has stuff in the menu, it's not very straight-forward for the mothery sort.(I am assuming that she will at some point want to do nothing but mess around with options for a while.)

did I mention that the computer I was speaking of is currently being used by my mother and it's perfect. gnome and kde are too much for the little box and she gets frustrated by anything else.

slackware is not a source-based distro. where did you get that idea?

Have tried Mandrake 7.2 and RedHat 7.0 on a sytem that old although it did have 64 M Ram and that will be the issue as well as your vid card. You will need a lite-weight gui - not KDE.

you could always try Freesbie ( live BSD ) and if it works load FreeBSD from the Freesbie

floppy

We all know what the best distro is and that is <insert your fav distro here>

<debian based Ubuntu>