Looking for light os for toshiba equium A200
1gb RAM
Pentium II 1.77ghz

Something kinda user friendly and capable of running some coding programs. Basic programs, just an old laptop I found and would like to revive it somewhat. Worked well with Win7 but kinda slow, so hoping to make it run smoother with a linux distro. Help?

Here are a couple you can try:

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=antix
http://puppylinux.org/main/Overview%...%20Started.htm

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My netbooks (Atom N270, 1GB RAM) run Mint 17.3 and Fedora 26, both with the Mate DE. Speed demons they are not, but I find them acceptable.

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Thanks for the replies! Looking into puppy linux, and would like to know whether I can download it to myhdd or does it have to be from a cd/usb? If so, how?

I'll second sevendogsbsd. Definitely give 'Puppy' Linux a try.....and ignore those members here who see it as a 'toy' distro.

Puppy is more than capable of running the newest software, browsers, music players, etc., and will definitely support all the mainline programming languages....Ruby, PERL, etc., etc.

Its biggest advantage is that of running every session totally from RAM.....which is the fastest component of any machine. You can install to the HDD, or you can run it from USB, zipdisk, SD card.....even a Live 'multisession' CD/DVD.....where your settings, etc., are saved back to the very same CD/DVD you're running it from!

You can find Puppy here.

(By the way, I think you mean a Pentium dual-core, not a Pentium II. Big difference..!)


Mike.

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Thanks to everybody! Will definite;y try out puppy!

AntiX is a good distro purpose built for old laptops/desktops.
http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

That laptop can run pretty much any linux distribution with a lightweight desktop environment or window manager. I would strongly recommend you do a 64 bit install (amd64) because Google Chrome is only supported in 64 bit, among other things.

For example, if you want to play Netflix, a 32 bit distribution can't do it. Firefox is the only 32 bit browser available to play Netflix (due to DRM requirements), and it will choke within 10 seconds of actual video playback on a machine with only 1GB of RAM. In contrast, Google Chrome will play Netflix on that computer just fine.

Debian with XFCE4, for example, may idle at about 83MB of RAM, which is a tiny fraction of what's available on that laptop. It's a fine option for your laptop, that will give a modern web browser like Google Chrome a lot of remaining RAM to work with.

I'll second fatmac on this; aside from my kennel-full of Pups, I've been experimenting with Anti-X the last few months. Based on Debian, it's fast, stable, and very light on resources.

I'd recommend it to anyone.


Mike.

If someone wants to minimize their headaches and maintenance issues, though, it would be better to use a Debian based distribution which has fewer major deviations from Debian. There's a reason AntiX still doesn't yet have a stable release based on the current Debian Stable (Debian 9). Something based more closely on Debian would simply do "apt-get dist-upgrade" and voila! Upgrade from Debian 8 to Debian 9 just like that.

I have some complex servers with multiple NICs and dist-upgrade on Debian just plain worked - even through the transition to systemd and device renamings. The only dist-upgrade I had real issues with was the hda->sda renaming way way way back from Etch->Lenny in 2009. But I expected it, since my main server at the time had a weird mix of PATA and SATA drives, and a somewhat complex /etc/fstab and GRUB. The annoying mess would made me simplify things, and I would greatly appreciate the switch to UUIDs later on.

I'm actually somewhat amazed at some of the things which Debian has made just work in dist-upgrades. Of course, it's particularly important for Debian dist-upgrades to just plain work, even in somewhat complex situations, because of how many servers run Debian Stable. The bottom line is that the Debian project is huge, so they have the resources to make this work seamlessly for the rest of us.