Hello everyone,

I have a PC which uses Windows OS, but I am planning to load the ISO of a lightweight Linux distro onto a USB stick and run it through VirtualBox.

I have currently Tiny Core running like that, but it's too tiny for my purposes, so I am not all that satisfied. Inside my Linux environment, I will be mainly doing text corpus generation through commands like wget, lynx, etc. (running bash scripts), run Nano or Gedit or any other word processor and some kind of browser to search on Internet. Also programs like Treetagger and suchlike. My limitations are that I can only assign 512 MB of RAM to VirtualBox (otherwise, maybe I could have just installed Ubuntu). So what do you suggest to me? I don't have the money to buy a new computer with Linux all to itself, hence the question.

By the way, the machine's running on a 1.7 GHz Intel i3 processor.

Thank you very much in advance!

Hi...

Welcome to the forum

Hmm, with only 512 MB's of memory, your options will definitely be limited. However, you can give Zorin OS 9 Lite or AntiX a try.

Regards...

Thanks, ardvark71! I will try antiX. What about any Puppy Linux distros? Any of them good for running on a 512 MB RAM?

Puppy will load its filesystem into RAM, so if you have limited memory it may be not the best thing to use. antiX should be fine.
To go a little bit into detail:
Any distro will provide that.
This will be your main problem, browsers nowadays are memory hogs. Depending on which features you need one of the pure text browsers (you mentioned Lynx already) might be a good option, but they usually do not provide stuff like Javascript engines. If you need Javascript then maybe something like qutebrowser or surf may be a viable solution. In any case, you don't want to further load your memory with running a fully fledged desktop environment, your best bet is using just a window manager, like one of the *boxes, Enlightenment or WindowMaker. antiX comes with XFCE by default, but it shouldn't be hard to use one of the WMs instead.
Never heard of those, so I can't comment on their resource usage, but a short look on the license indicates that it is unlikely that you will find it packaged in a distributions repository.

Thanks a lot, TobiSGD! I will try AntiX then, and if any issues, come back to this forum.

Yes, I will have to install Treetagger separately. I already have it installed it in Windows, but I think I will have to install a Linux version somewhere. It does not use a lot of resources, as long as my corpus is short. I will work on bigger corpus only once I have a dedicated machine this summer.

You're welcome. If you like AntiX and have no further issues or questions, please mark this thread as "SOLVED" by clicking on "Thread Tools" directly above your initial post. Thanks!

Regards...

Sure, I will do that!

Why do you need to run Linux in a VM? Is a reboot and running from the USB stick an option? If yes, there are plenty of live media out there, and some distros are even specialized for running without installation. Some are even able to work alongside Windows and save dava in the Windows file system.

Puppy used to be like that; not sure if they have changed strategy.

Xfce is the default desktop for MX which is a distro provided by Antix.Mepis community based on Debian stable. Antix itself uses IceWM window manager based on Debian testing

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Thanks for the correction.