Old Pc
 

hello, i have an old pc that ran windows 98 on it, and it has 800mhz processor and 120mb of ram. which distro do you think would run good on this. i need a distro that is mostly user friendly with internet.

Some distros that might fit that:

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
http://www.puppylinux.org/
http://vectorlinux.com/

Or maybe one of the distros using LXDE:

http://lxde.sourceforge.net/download.html

Xubuntu should also run well on it. I've run it on a computer with a slower processor than yours and it ran great. Only apps that would be slow anyway, like Firefox, caused any real problems.

I would recommend PClinuxOS 2009. The essential codecs for playing mp3s,flash,java and others are preinstall for playback on your system and your web browser.

If you feel that kde is too heavy for your system, install xfce or fluxbox using the package manager.

It's user friendly and radically simple.

- Cheers

falcon87407:

Your processor is good enough, but the RAM... I hope the whole of it is available (no video chip robbing from it).

There is a distro intended by the author to run on aged machines, it is called Absolute Linux current version is 12.2.1 derived from Slackware. I have tried run it on a machine almost equally like that of yours.

Absolute Linux installs very easy, just like Slackware. It also has enough minimal productivity applications, the CD2 has Open Office Suite. I liked the offered Flux Windowing Manager. Though for the heavy terminal lovers the offered terminal colored black on white is not a welcome since white background is too much to tire the eyes.

Give it a try. Read the documentations on the cd first, as well as those offered from the website. visit the site:

http://www.absolutelinux.org/download.shtml

Hope this helps.

Goodluck.

Try Knoppix? Might save you some needed hard disk space, and boots nicely on most hardware. Also, you can check it out without installing, and you can install it on a usb stick if you are lucky enough to have usb 2.0, otherwise it would be a pain..:) But you might get a faster desktop with a flash drive than with the original hard drive if it's old and slow. Also, the new Knoppix 6 is based on LXDE and Microknoppix, which makes it pretty fast to boot and work with.

If your main priority is web surfing it would be a great alternative, given you can choose not to save anything on hard drive or other storage, you are guaranteed that you will always start with a clean install, and you will be pretty safe from web bugs and other "evils". You would benefit greatly from a swap file/drive though, 128 Mb RAM is not much to work with, and investing in some extra ram chips (which would be very cheap for this machine, I guess) would make a world of difference in the machine's usability.

in addition to dsl, puppy, and vector Linux you might want to look at Austrumi. screenshot

If you upgrade the RAM in that box (512 MB at least), pretty much any Distro should work with a lightweight desktop like XFCE or LXDE.

thanks alot,
i'm going to go buy some ram now. i'll leave an update if all works well.

If you are not sure what type of memory you have go to
http://crucial.com/ and use the Memory Advisor Tool.

Once you know the memory type, you can buy the memory from them
or other computer retail/web store.

Good luck