Recommend a neat LINUX distro for an old laptop with p3 ,128Mb ram running@ 800Mhz
 

Hello

My brother gave me an old laptop "HP omnibook XE3" with P3 processor ,800Mhz,128 MB ram and 20 gb HDD which is designed for microsoft professional 2000 only. i've tried windows Xp and found that its very slow !!!!

>>>>Later i tried "FLUXUBUNTU" (ubuntu based ).It ran very well to some extent but on installing apps like "firefox and other java based ,the apps just used to hang the system...


>>>>PLease recommend me a neat LINUX distro that can make this old laptop work again neatly without hanging etc etc..

Thanks in advance

puppy, dsl ...

I currently have an IBM T20 (650mhz processor) that I swap disks between Ubuntu 8.10 and Slackware 12.1. The only difference is 256m of memory. Both Ubuntu and Slack give acceptable performance. If you have an empty memory slot, a 128m stick is currently on ebay for 12.95 and 256m for 30-50 depending on seller. This may be the best was to get use out of that system. You may also be able to find a "parts" machine which has the memory and other parts you might find useful about the same price.

Rich

I have been running slackware 12+ on an older thinkpad for a few months now and I have been really happy with it. The install, even if you put everything in, will leave a decent amount of space still on your 20gb hdd. I think you could get away with the 128mb of ram as long as you use a lightweight wm (I have been using fluxbox, and with firefox and a few terminal windows open now I am using about that).

I do second the advice to add more ram. If you think you will be actually using it for more than just playing around in linux the investment is almost certianly worth it. If you dont want to go the ebay route, older memory is still really cheap (I got 2-gigs shipped for like $30 off newegg). Just check how much your system can hold and how many slots you have open.

:cool:




>>>>After googling for some time i found out vector linux lite 5.9(slack based ).It uses fluxbox as window manager and it needs only 64 Mb ram to run .That sound great to me and i gotta giv a try :)..............

>>>>> I gotta run apps like cisco's "Packet Tracer 5" and wine if possible . I really dont know whether they gonna work

>>>>> Anyways Thanks

Slackware 12.1 will run on 128m of memory, however running the applications will require more memory. Running a command line would be ok on 64m of memory, but trying to run any GUI based application would be so slow you would not want to do it. Even with a 700m - 800m processor, the more memory the better performance.

Rich

Besides the good distro suggestions already given, consider a ram upgrade. Your laptop (and most P3 systems) can probably accept 512MB. With that much ram, it could run any current linux distribution. I have an old compaq armada with a P3 650 and 512MB and it runs ubuntu 8.04 just fine. 20GB is plenty large enough for the HD.

I agree with 1wasserm. I run Kubuntu 8.04 on an IBM T20 with 512MB and a PIII 700. RAM is much more important than CPU speed with respect to having a running platform. Of course CPU and RAM can make life nice, but that's another story.

Try to figure out how much more RAM your machine can take and plug it in. Even a lightweight GUI/wm will run much better in more memory space.

>>>>yeah ur rite of course but i've already invested on my machine (display probs and etc etc etc etc) and i cant anymore!!!!!!!!!!!!!

>>>>>with lowend distro's like DSL and vector lite and others i'm hoping that it will do well withexisting configuration!!!!!!!!!

Anyways Thank You:newbie:

I run an 850MHz athalon with 256MB ram on Fedora 9, so I would at least give the mainstream distros a try.

Have you checked into Xubuntu? I have had success with 2 different older laptops. Runs fine with only 128. You might want to try one of the older versions.
I would also recommend upgrading the RAM. 256 works even better!

Happy Hunting

>>>>>Thank You

OP has already said that he can not invest much now. So that is another story. Also newegg would ship everything and charge $. living here in India, that is not very good possibility and 30$ could be cheap there but not for me at least.(1$ = ~47INR)
I guess Xubuntu is a "Give-it-a-try" distro. It has been built for low-on-resources machines.
Also as suggested DSL, Slax and Vector are good. You might want to try DreamLinux as well. That is also small and light. Puppy is something that can be considered.
If possible look out for a seconds shop in your city who can give you a used ram stick cheaply. Something he does not need would be give away for him.

>>>>>>>>>>Thanks Mate !!!!!!!!!!!!

Wish you well with Xubuntu, worked well for me. Hope you can get a good download. Ubuntu will send a free CD but Xubuntu is download only.
No Open Office but AbiWord works great. Good OS if you can live with keep it simple.
Happy Hunting

I'm running Fedora 9 on my Dell Latitude C610 with a 20 gig HD and 128 megs of ram. It is running fine, with the exception of the Netgear WG511 v2 Wireless PC card. It doesn't "see" the card. If I use the ethernet connection I can access the web just fine, it just isn't performing in wireless mode.

I'm using the Dell to learn Linux, and it isn't needed in wireless mode, so it's not a killer. Hopefully in time I'll figure out how to get it to run in wireless mode.

I agree that it is a good idea to have extra RAM but if you wish to use a Linux OS that works fine with your existing 128MB of memory then I suggest you try antiX:

http://antix.mepis.org/index.php/Main_Page

It worked perfectly for me with an old P2 with 128MB.

If you need help then look here:

http://mepislovers.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=40

or here:

http://antix.freeforums.org/

Thanks for that! I downloaded AntiX and tried it out. That's a very nice distro and I like that they included ABYwrite as the word processor. I found out that my problem with the Netgear wireless card is that it was designed for Windows. It just"ain't talkin'" to Linux. Like I said, the laptop is a learning machine, so it's not a problem for now.

Thanks again, John

Just ran across this little gem in Linux Format.

Austrumi

Check out the Screenshots Not bad for a little distro for low spec hardware..

http://cyti.latgola.lv/ruuni/screenshoots/a-172.jpg
http://cyti.latgola.lv/ruuni/screenshoots/a-172a.jpg
http://cyti.latgola.lv/ruuni/screenshoots/a-180.jpg
http://cyti.latgola.lv/ruuni/screenshoots/a-185.jpg


FVWM
2.6.28 Kernel
Xorg7.3
96MB in Size.. (fits right between DSL and Puppy)

I think I'm going to have to download this and give it a run on some of my older hardware.

Thanks!

I just downloaded it and will try it out. I always have room for an additional distro, because I'm fixing up computers for a charity and keep looking for distros that are easy to understand yet have some punch.

Looks like a nice distribution. I am downloading it. Quite a small sized distro with almost all the daily needed packages. And its based on Slack. So its going to be tough.

I had a problem booting up to Astrumi. Running Nvidia 256 Meg card, got a crazy warning note and it hung up while booting up, had to shut down. When I started back up in Windows, my desktop picture was screwed up. That is a concern. I'll try with my laptop later and see how that does.

Elive
 

I would suggest you to use Elive...

Elive is a really nice OS. It is very light and at the same time has some good eye candy. It doesn't look light but it is.

Try it.

Thanks,

While Elive looks very nice, my problem is that I am reconstructing computers that have been donated, then we give them to the poor. A free operating system is essential to that concept. Although we would encourage the users to support the creators of the operating system by donating something after they are operating it, a request for a donation prior to downloading, as the elive web site requests, places it in the payware area.

I'll have to pass on it for now.

Thanks again.

Neat Linux Distro
 

I agree with this, I have been running Slackware 12.1 on an old Thinkpad 660E with 6 Gb hard disk for some time now. I upgraded the RAM to 192 Mb. I stuck with twm as the window manager as I am familiar with it, and did not need any more than the ability to launch a few light-weight programs + firefox.

A few months down the line, I decided to use this laptop as a mail server. Power consumption is about 12W when idle. The screen is closed and permanently off. It connects to my wireless router with a Belkin PCMCIA card. As the wireless connection can fail from time to time, I wrote a shell script to test every five minutes and restart the card if it is down. The domain is registered on 1and1 and DNS is handled by dydns. I back up the stored mail onto a Lacie drive by ftp.

I find this 'server' useful for all kinds of things I hadn't anticipated, such as testing php/mysql code, and bringing my old Atari back to life as a dumb terminal.

You do realize the latest packet tracer will run native in linux.
Check in the downloads section on the cisco site.

good luck.

Astrumi ran well on old desktop and not so old laptop. It ejects the cd once the os is in ram and that makes more sense that it can be used for other purposes.
I also tested DreamLinux 5 and it worked well as well. Only compiz was not enabled. But good thing was that it detected my intel pro wireless card and supported it out of the box that Ubuntu Ibex did not.

I'm hesitant about trying Astrumi again on my main computer because of that startup problem. I never had a live CD install foul up my graphics before. (But I'll probably take another shot at it with the laptop).

I'll take a gander at Dreamlinux 5, who knows, it might cure the wireless weakness with the laptop...I visited the Dreamlinux site. Is the iso for a live CD or are you required to install it to your hard drive? I would prefer trying it out as a live CD, but after reading through the info, I'm not sure I can use it as a live CD.

Thanks.

Go get some of my multidistro stuff or roll your own with "multicd.sh"
You'll save on CD's.

( http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-works-714322/ )

( http://multicd.tuxfamily.org/ )

You can use the DreamLinux 5 as a live cd and if you want you can then install it with Easy Install. It is more or less same as Ubuntu as it is based on Debian.

Posting from Austrumi now.. Slick little distro. the interface looks very sharp.
Quite frankly it looks nicer than some mainstream distros out of the box .imho.

Love the memory reading.. 118 MB / 990 MB 11% : )

Now I have to find some old box to try this on.

Austrumi could not find the network card built in the laptop on which I tested it. Will have to put more time on it.

Astrumi worked fine on my laptop, with the exception of not being able to see the PCMCIA wireless card. I didn't have any graphics problems with it, I'll try later to see if it will work on my Dell desktop. The crash may have been a momentary glitch.

pcmcia wireless card would require additional support

pcmcia card services
pcmcia utilities

I'd be surprised if those were included in asutrumi by default due to the limited size of the distro.

My question is, where do you get these from? For example Netgear does not seem to have any drivers for Linux and only for Windows on their web site. Do you know who carries these drivers?

well you would start by doing lspcmcia that should show you WHAT wireless chip-set is on the card, (provided the PCMCIA support and utilities are installed in the OS)

Once you know what chip is on the card, you can locate the driver.. you need to get setup and working.

I also found out that ifconfig command did not work in Austrumi.

Thanks farslayer,

I'll try that lspmcia command in terminal mode and see what happens. I tried Dreamlinux and it worked very well on the laptop. It seems to indicate that it recognizes Windows pcmcia drivers, but my laptop is set up with a full install of fedora 9, because I'm using the Fedora 9 book to learn Linux and do not have Windows on the machine. I tried to see if I could install the Windows drivers, but the Dreamlinux live CD will not release the CD ROM once you've booted up with it, and fedora doesn't recognize the files on the pcmcia install disk.

Like I said earlier, the laptop is for experimenting (and I'm sure doing a LOT of that!) with Linux and I can get on line with it using the ethernet connection, so it's not a total but it would be nice if I could make the laptop fully wireless.

Thanks again, I'll try your suggestion.

Interesting, it works on mine.

You might wanna try TinyCore Linux-the guy who made mydsl,etc is behind it.
Check it out...

Neat Linux?
 

Turn a page fi seeking help, this post is one in the line of endless questions by long-time-no-see newbie user(s). I hanged on the topic title (regarding neat distributions), although the situation is slightly different.

In a position of an system administrative enthusiast I'm guarding the machines wellness in an "application" in which a second is higly important and valuable - 24/7 work, maybe less at the end but daily this outdated and fairly old (no exact specifications) computer must open loads of Internet pages and write documents.
Simplified: it's a radio studio machine, sitting there for the speakers orientation 'round news, diffferent texts, websurfing and other common / daily everybody-does-it tasks.

Linux powers the system with opensource, it is kept simple with Ubuntu and "embedded" software (Firefox, OpenOffice) - age makes footprints and things are getting slower.
What, by your opinion, is the best distribution for such a x86 PC? Keep in mind that handling is led by non-Linux users and it must be fast, simple, maybe even more Windows-like.

Thank you for advice.

With best regards,
BIG_Yack

RAM would be your main challenge. Most modern distros won't run well on anything less then 512MB.

For your purposes, any distro should work really. It all boils down to the windows manager & app choices. Like you experienced, apps like Firefox are bound to be slow. You just need to find reasonable lightweight alternatives to your usual apps. Such using Dillo or Midori instead of Firefox.

I believe it is not underfed in terms of RAM - but I will have to check the configuration, as I said.

It already was on the mind of other knowledge sources, but my opinion still stands; the amount of preinstalled, sometimes unnecessary, packages depends on distribution - expirience shows such behaviour in Ubuntu. What is the customizable distro?
And turn the spotlight to the other point of mine; is there any, simple, Linux clone of Windows?

Thank you.

Best regards,
BIG_Yack