I need a very light distro for an old laptop, so my mother can see youtube and surf the Internet on her bedroom, any suggestions? The laptop cannot accept mora than 256 MB of ram, but right now has the half of it, 128 MB. So, I've got two choices, to use a light system or upgrade the laptop. I'm open for any help.

Thanks in advance

I would upgrade the laptop, personally. There is a lot of free/cheap used hardware out there right now due to Windows XP end-of-life.

Youtube on Linux has the following hardware requirements (according to Adobe Corp, creators of the non-open-source Flash player):

So, no matter which Linux distro you choose, the hardware is incapable of watching Youtube, playing Farmville, or anything else that depends on Flash.

Hi. I had a similr idea and installed AntiX on an old laptop, haven't used it much, but I was impressed, it seems faster than when AXP (XP) was installed, give it a whirl. Use Netbootin to write it on a usb stick to try/install.

Moved: This thread is more suitable in <Linux - Distributions> and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

AntiX will definitely work. The last time I tried it I could use the web browser and the word processor with less that 120MB of memory used — not at the same time, though! And I could use flash, because I always check.

@ snowpine. Don't believe everything you read! Or rather interpret it: the requirements obviously take into account those of the distros concerned.

It's not that I'm particularly credulous, it's that I don't have enough time in the day to Support for free something that is completely Unsupported by its team of high-paid developers.

To be honest with you, I would possibly upgrade the unit to have a good amount of memory and such. Web browsing can take up a lot of memory due to how much multimedia is incorporated into websites. You possibly should even look into replacing it.

If all she needs is web browsing and YouTube media, as an alternative, look into a tablet like an Android Pad or Apple iPad. They're easy to use too.

Dear simsalagrimm2014,

Although I would recommend upgrading your hardware, because nowadays web browsing requires lots of RAM. But if you want to try it on 128 M RAM system with only web browsing and youtube, try using Puppy Linux, Slitaz, or Tiny Core Linux.

Install Midori as web browser, or other lightweight alternatives and also try to find a lightweight youtube viewing application.

What would be the point of using distributions that by default copy the complete filesystem into RAM (read: decreasing the RAM available to applications) on machines that already have a low amount of RAM?

With puppy you can do what is called a full installation that is easier on ram. However unless things have changed you have to do a reinstall for upgrades and sfs are harder to install. There is a frugal not to ram but tends to be slow.
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/FrugalOrFullInstallation The speed comparison is based on enough ram to run a fugal install loaded to ram.

The problem with that is that Puppy was designed on the assumption that it would run as a clean copy from RAM. Remember that Puppy runs as root, so it is not secure if run from a full install, which is why they recommend a frugal install. But whatever you do, Puppy recommends 512MB, not 128! Which is why I recommended AntiX.

I didn't know that the ram requirements on puppy had gone up.

Moore's law, baby!

There is a fork of Puppy Linux 4 Unleashed ideal for old hardware see here

http://sourceforge.net/projects/anitaos/

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As far as I know these distros doesn't default to copy to RAM. We have to give 'toram' as kernel option. However it may be the fact that on newer version puppy linux defaults to it.

Recommended requirements are actually always higher than what is minimum requires.
But anyway I accept Puppy Linux is a bit more RAM demanding.

Although I haven't used, but there is another version known as Wary Puppy, which is targeted at older hardware.

Also Slitaz is a good option to go. It has builtin lightweight midori browser.
But All these worked fine on my computer which was having 256 M of RAM.
So probably 128 M is quite too old.