Light distro

of1967 · 11-28-2005, 10:14 AM

Hello

I have a old Toshiba and I would like to know if there is any distro that runs softly in this machine. Here are the specs.
Thanks.

AMD K6 300 MHz
64 MB RAM
HD: 4GB

Thank you.

ORlando

Bruce Hill · 11-28-2005, 10:57 AM

Welcome to LQ!

My 5 year-old has a Compaq with an AMD-K6 233Mhz, 96 MB RAM, 4 GB hard drive.
She is running Slackware-10.1, using Thunderbird, Firefox, and xterm primarily, but
not only. A big key is your window manager / desktop environment. You don't have
enough RAM for a resource user like KDE or Gnome, but you could run Fluxbox as she
does ... it only needs about 3MB of RAM.

fouldsy · 11-28-2005, 10:59 AM

Quite a few - Debian, Slackware, Gentoo to name a few. With those specs, any distro with a light window manager (i.e. *not* Gnome or KDE) and with as few running services as possible (i.e. don't run Apache + MySQL all the time if you only do web design once a week...) should be fine. Read through some other threads along the same lines with recommendations for Linux distros and try a few out.

of1967 · 11-28-2005, 11:16 AM

Thanks a lot for the sugestions...

Orlando

Vgui · 11-28-2005, 11:52 AM

In addition to Slackware, which I would recommend first, there are a few alternatives. Check out Damn Small Linux (and others based on it or similar to it). Another would be Vector Linux, which is Slackware based and used to be very light and great for old hardware (I find it to be losing that focus and becoming heavier).

fouldsy · 11-28-2005, 12:15 PM

DSL + Penguin, etc. are great, but possibly a bit too under-featured considering what the machine would be capable of...? Worth looking at though if you find other distros aren't quite quick enough on your machine