devils casper

This poll/thread is meant to help those users that are having difficulty deciding which distribution(s) they should use to work with their older/weaker computer.

Please use it to post information about your favorite distro for older/weaker hardware. Do not post comments saying that any particular distro is the best, because the best truly is very subjective.

Note that this thread will be locked and/or deleted at the end of the year and a new thread started.

The poll from last year can be found here.

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mhanan

Found a dirt old thinkpad P3 circa 1998... 800ishMHz w/ 256mb RAM that ran Mandriva like a champ.

Didn't try any of the 'thinner' distros... no need when Mandriva ran so well.

rokytnji

Puppy Dingo got my vote.

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Surak

i chose damn small because it looks nice.

elija

Has to be Vector. If you didn't have to run Puppy as root all the time that would have got my vote

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dandart

Xenon OS! Woo! Requires 20MB of memory and a 386!
Xenon is WIP. Now recruiting.

deBebbler

If the system (no matter how slow the processor) has 256MB RAM or more, Puppy 4 (Dingo) is fantastic running totally in RAM. With a current release of Firefox and greatly improved wireless support, it can take an old laptop and breathe new life into it.

For systems with less than 256 MB (esp those with <128) a hard drive install of Damn Small Linux will get you back in the race.

Check out this success story with a circa 1995 desktop and DSL

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/cof...-life-dsl.html

Cheers

b2bwild

My vote for Puppy, I think its better than DSL.
I think LFS is the best option for old hardware..custom compiled system is little faster and optimized.

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multios

TinyMe, but I have also run Slackware and Debian on my 200 mhz machine (along with *bsd and OS/2 Warp 4)

racepres

for "really old" how bout a AST j20 100 big mhz processor w/ almost 24M of ram... For that one only DSL will even come "online".. but I am a GUI guy [mac] but I'm gonna try some that others have mentioned!RP
BTW for more "modern" stuff I really haven't found anything that is "cooler" than Puppy in the MacPup Carnation!!!