Distro for a 98 meg toshiba lappy AMD ?
 

I need advice on a distro for an AMD Toshiba Satelite 2060cds laptop.
Its has 98 ram, 4 gig HD and a 366mhz AMD k6-2 processor.

So far I have tried:
Slitaz, ubuntu lite, ubuntu minimal, kbuntu, feather, mini, damnsmall linux and puppy... and others I cant recall.

I just realised that its probably the AMD architecture that is causing all the problems, so I got Mepis and Mepis lite.

MepisLite eventually installed but is so slow as to be useless.
Puppy worked well, but its a bit of a pain to install it on the HD. I have done it in the past.

Can anyone recommend something that is a bit faster than mepislite?

I dont really want to go back to Win98, but it really was fast by comparison with Mepislite

Remember, I only have 98 meg of ram !

Its a Toshiba Satelite 2060cds, circa 2002 I think?

Jeff

On machines of similar spec, I typically install a bare bones Debian system (i.e. text only). Then I only install the programs I need as I need them. The real trick is picking a lightweight desktop manager and lightweight applications.

For desktops, I typically use IceWM, but have dabbled w/ Windowmaker, Enlightenment, fluxbox, and XFCE4. I've been wanting to try out LXDE (which is supposedly really slick) from the Lenny repos but don't have an old machine around to play with right now.

For applications, you have to avoid the pigs like Firefox/Iceweasel and Openoffice.org. You may have to give up a little bit of coolness and polish and instead focus on functionality. I still usually just suck it up w/ firefox because I haven't found a browser I like yet. But for openoffice, I use Abiword (sometimes I just nano) and gnumeric. For mail, I use mutt or claws (formerly syphleed-claws I believe). There are numerous lightweight picture viewers, and you can get performance by using other tools only from the command line (like mplayer for music) without a gui.

Additionally, on old machines like yours, you will probably see an improvement by compiling your own kernel. You can cut out support for a bunch of hardware you don't need. The downside is you have to recompile if you use hardware for stuff you cut out. If you do this, there is a "debian way" to compile kernels that will give you a *.deb package to install, which is nice for install/removal.

The other thing I liked about this build-from-the-ground-up method was I learned an awful lot about Debian and about linux in general since I had to get my hands dirty a bit.

*Edited a bit about compiling kernels and whatnot *

That is an old laptop.

You need to know there is a problem with amd-k6 at 350Mhz. Some instruction is exectued much faster on these chips, and M$ windows fell over because the processor was too efficient. Linux patched, and we were fairly OK. But it cab still cause issued. I had one in the 90s. Excuse a link to a hostile web site
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/192841

I say this because everyone has forgotten about the AMD K6-350 now and the same errors could reappear. Windows98 crashes reliably on that cpu without a patch, which is probably no longer available.

The distros that recommends themselves are two.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org (which you have tried and failed)
http://kevux.org

Both are uClibc based with fewer bells and whistles, and built using uClibc instead the (bloated) glibc

Kevux is one of the wierdest. FHS compliance is nowhere, but it is very secure because of this and other notions which we all might have, but this guy actually got into a distro. YMMV

If you need a standard system, use Slkackware with xfce. Or roll your own

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org

Mind you, people are throwing out better specced pcs in some parts of the world.

Have you checked out Tinycore-1.4.2; it's the new improved DSL and might work on that old bird-it runs good on my Toshiba 7000CT w/ 160MB RAM and 4GB HD
( http://www.tinycorelinux.com/ )

[I] gotta usb Tinycore here-
( http://multidistro.com/downloads/off...icialusbs.html )

Oh yeah, one more thing: if you do decide to go with Windows 98, Auto-Patcher is the only way to go after install. It'll do all the updates and reboots without you having to sit there and baby sit.

Thanks guys. I certainly went fast with win 98, but I was hoping to use a linux distro. I have become a bit spoilt with all the ubuntu/mint stuff which does everythign for you.

Thanks for all that good feedback.

jeff

I found austrumi to be rather responsive on older hardware. (Slackware based)

http://cyti.latgola.lv/ruuni/

For less than 128 MB of ream they recommend the following command at boot: al nocache

Looks really nice too. since it's a live CD you can boot from it to test, the entire system runs from RAM and the CD ejects after the system is loaded. if you like it click the menu link to "install to hard drive"

Heh heh. I didnt waste a cd on that one. Got a rewritable! I am learning.

This is what i got:
This kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU.
pae cmov. Unable to boot - please use a kernel appropriate for your CPU.

Thanks anyway, will put it aside for some of my bigger machines with 128 and 256 ram.

Cheers
Jeff

Gucci Purses
 

hello everyone, i'm new here... thought i'd drop a line here or something. thanks!


Thanks
Kalis