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-   -   Distro recomendation for an old PC (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/distro-recomendation-for-an-old-pc-874812/)

nicolasjengler 04-13-2011 11:45 AM

Distro recomendation for an old PC
 
Hi, I have an old Pentium III 1 Ghz PC with a usb wifi adapter (TP-Link TL-WN722N) and I want to try a really lightweight distro. I don't mind using Feather or DSL (I already use both on another PC) but I can't seem to find a way to make the adapter to work.

¿Suggestions? ¿Does anyone know how to get the wifi adapter working?

business_kid 04-13-2011 12:37 PM

Health warning with dsl, kevux, and other light uClibC distros: Because they use uClibc, your threading is limited (Affects wine, for one), no locales except en_US, and possible difficulty in compiling from source.

Other lightweights are: linuxfromscratch, kevux. You will of course be avoiding bloatware. On the wifi, It's Supported all right

Kevux will probably have that driver precompiled, but you will probably need firmware, and that's a different story. Kevux isn't for everyone.

NirvanaII 04-13-2011 01:13 PM

Try AntiX, I used this on my last PC (a P4), and everything just seemed to work - flash, network connection, movie players - as well as it being stable. It makes use of the debain repositories too, which means a ton of available packages. The distro is especially designed for older machines, and part of the Simply Mepis family (which I now use on a newer machine), branching off its releases (...8.0, 8.5, and now 11.)

http://distrowatch.com/index.php?dis...h=all&year=all

nicolasjengler 04-13-2011 02:07 PM

Thanks people, I think I'll check them out later. I really appreciate your responses ^_^ if anybody else has any other recomendation feel free to post it.

TobiSGD 04-13-2011 03:25 PM

Recommendations for an OS need more info about the specs of the machine, at least it would help to know how much RAM it has. If it has 256MB or more I would recommend Slackware or Debian with XFCE or LXDE as desktop environment. If it is less I would recommend to use a WM, like one of the *boxes (Slackware comes with Fluxbox pre-installed), IceWM or JWM. A search on Distrowatch for distributions for older computers comes up with this.
I personally would recommend distros like Puppy, Tinycore or Slitaz for older computers.

nicolasjengler 04-13-2011 03:42 PM

Hi, I'm sorry I didn't gave more information, my bad.
It's a PIII 1Ghz with 384MB Ram, and an on-board 8MB video card (a generic SiS). I've already tried Puppy and Slitaz but they won't boot up on this machine (already tried turning ACPI off too) so right now I'm downloading AntiX to see if it works ok.

darkduck 04-13-2011 06:16 PM

Maybe SLAX? Or it's newer version Porteus?

TobiSGD 04-13-2011 06:41 PM

I forgot to mention Vector Linux, which is known to run fine on older machines.

nicolasjengler 04-13-2011 09:32 PM

1 Attachment(s)
Thanks for all the replies people. I installed AntiX and it works awesome. I had to compile the drivers for the wireless adapter and set wlan0 on wicd to make it work but nothing that a Linux user can't handle. Everything is running great. Thanks for all the tips.


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