Hello all,

I am currently taking my six year old little sister's computer and putting Linux on it. It is an old Dell P3 750mhz with 128mb of ram. All this thing is going to do is get on the internet.

I dont mind having to compile a few packages from source or recompiling the kernel, I just don't want to have to install a bunch of useless stuff while at the same time not having to compile everything.

She has gotten accustomed to having the start button so I think I am going to go with IceWM with some XP theme and Opera as the browser. Other than that, all I really want is to have bootsplash screen with Tux and the progress bar (bootsplash.org).

I guess my question is, do any relatively small distros (lets say less than a gig used disk space after install) meet these standards? I'm trying to stay away from the big distros to keep it small, Puppy and DSL came close but weren't quite enough. I would really like a standard partitioning system and to have the kernel sources available.

Any tips on where to find some kids stuff that doesnt look like old Win 3.11 apps would be cool.

Thanks in advance,

xp314

PS I apologize if this is the wrong forum for this type of question.

Dell P3 750mhz with 128mb of ram
PIII is definately usable. (BTW, you forgot to mention HD size) I would first upgrade the RAM to 512. It's not that expensive and you get to play with a lot more stuff that way. Then I'd run some Live CD's to see what you fancy.


Any tips on where to find some kids stuff that doesnt look like old Win 3.11 apps would be cool.
Sorry, Haven't any clue. Tried searching LQ? There's bound to be some threads on stuff for kids.


PS I apologize if this is the wrong forum for this type of question.
No, it's cool here.

i ran gnome on a 500mhz 128mb ram pc for a while (fedora core 5). it was slow, but not _that_ slow. if you up'd the ram youd be set for pretty muck any distro.

their are a bunch of games thats kids can play on linux. things like supertux, tuxkart, tuxracer, and even tuxtype are pretty fun little kids games.

as much as i am not a huge fan of the *buntu line of distros, the edubuntu is great for kids as it has plenty of kid freindly games built into the install. it is a bit heavier then you sound like you are looking for and use gnome. it will run just fine on the above specs you have listed, but also as stated upgrading to 256 or even better 512M ram will make all the differance in the world for the GUI.

my kids (3 and 10yrs) use edubuntu and have no problems with it. they can navigate, and even reboot the computer when they need/want to get into windows. yes i have it dual boot so they can play their JumpStart and Reading Rabbit games.

Thanks for the help. I'll definitely be looking to that stuff. Also, I'm just gonna try to work with the ram that it already has, the smaller window managers worked just fine. KDE and GNOME ran horribly slow with both SuSE and Fedora. It has a 10 gig hd, I just want to keep the install small becuase the only thing it will be used for is internet and maybe some small kids games.

Thanks again,

xp314

You might want to take a look at Arch for a base for this. It's real stripped down and makes it easy to only put on there the stuff you want. Edubuntu might still be worth looking at just to see what kind of packages it includes to see what you might want to add.