Linux great for old PCs

I have finally found a suitable Linux distro for my laptop. I have installed Vector Linux which uses the latest kernal and ICEWM as the windows manager. I currenty have loads of sites open, the complex input box on VBulliten (zerogain) and have installed Firefox with ease. My hard driver has not ticked in the last 5 minutes whileI have been browsing indicating that everything is currently stored in the RAM.

THis is so fast it has to be seen to believed, a September 2004 operating system, a Sept 2004 browser all running smoothly and really fast. The specifcations of the hardware? A P233MMX with 64MB RAM

It runs smoother than Win98SE did on this laptop. Instattion was a pain but I learn't a lot about operating systems and linux during the process, in the end I had to manualy enter the partitition and boot sector info but it was worth it! I did install Mandrake 10 on this laptop but it was so slow it was unusable. The resolution had to be set manualy in the X86config file but it did automaticaly detect my PCMCIA network card and then my DHCP server did the rest.

Getting Windows 98 to work with my network was a pain.

So before you decide to through away a second PC because it can't run XP think about getting a good linux distro.

 

I am a houre though, and most flavours of linux I have seen look awful, I have never found a skin that looked finished or polished.

There seems to be a thing in PC land that says the more agricultural it looks the better, look at XP for gods sakes, stick a few green and red buttons in and hope for the best lol

 

I am using the XP skin on my laptop so it looks like you're using XP .

Madrake is very polished in its look but because of this it eats lots of memory, it runs fine on my Althlon 2000, 512MB RAM system but I wouldn't like to use it with less than 256MB RAM.

 

He he - but Naim make a mint trading on "agricultural" looks There we go again - style over content. Typical Mac user

Seriously though - would a 486/100 with 24 megs run Linux? I have a cunning plan for a 1995 Compaq laptop....

 

Dom, I'm sure you could find a Linux distro that would work with that hardware, considering that you can get versions that run of a floppy disk. You might have to forgo some of the flashier/nicer interface options etc. but you never know. Try this link http://www.linuxiso.org and use the sorting method by architecture and choose i386 and above. There seem to be a fair few that would work.

 

Earlier Kernals will run fine on a 486 but it will probably only cope with a very old windows manager. If all you plan to do is text based then a 486 will make a very nice router or light weight server.

 

a good WM is fluxbox as its uses very little cpu power for general usage a good distro to get for use on a lo power system is the stable build of Debian 3.0 a little harder to install the say mandrake but well worth it for its apt-get system.

 

Something to do when the nights draw in you can pick yet another flavour of Linix to try via this live cd list.
List of Live CDs