Still use an old linux distro?

[Digit]

anyone use an old distro?
(please link to any older threads like this u might know of too)

i recently saw a review where the reviewer commented on how a distro was suitable for machines with a low amount of ram... 512. in the comments, rightly so, someone mentioned how they used to run a desktop with no qualms with just 32mb (i myself have run deli linux on a machine with just 16mb). and what's happened in linux since then was asked. indeed... were these old distros so much better equiped to do the business without the bloat?

it seems perhaps they are.

it takes some serious strict dedication and careful monitoring, in any long running open source project, to beat off the bloat. and i'm not just being negative, some of that extra weight is doing stuff. but for those of us yet to learn the ways of delving into the code to know everything about our machines, we just surf around for a great lightweight starting point for ours.

so if you know of something which many of the must-have-the-newest crowd would consider ancient, that's still worthy and of use... please do share.


... or just come here n slag me off for suggesting that bloat exists even in the linux community, i dont mind.

[techieMoe]

Bloat is in the eye of the beholder. I'm not a pack-rat, so if a computer ceases to be useful with modern operating systems I generally donate it to charity. Though lately my life has been much too busy for computer fiddling.

[rokytnji]

Some older releases of puppy linux are HERE

[computerophil]

anyone use an old distro?
(please link to any older threads like this u might know of too)

i recently saw a review where the reviewer commented on how a distro was suitable for machines with a low amount of ram... 512. in the comments, rightly so, someone mentioned how they used to run a desktop with no qualms with just 32mb (i myself have run deli linux on a machine with just 16mb). and what's happened in linux since then was asked. indeed... were these old distros so much better equiped to do the business without the bloat?

it seems perhaps they are.

it takes some serious strict dedication and careful monitoring, in any long running open source project, to beat off the bloat. and i'm not just being negative, some of that extra weight is doing stuff. but for those of us yet to learn the ways of delving into the code to know everything about our machines, we just surf around for a great lightweight starting point for ours.

so if you know of something which many of the must-have-the-newest crowd would consider ancient, that's still worthy and of use... please do share.


... or just come here n slag me off for suggesting that bloat exists even in the linux community, i dont mind.

Hallo, I do use older distros and I have also downloadlinks specially for older Puppy and Knoppix at my homePage.
In German Wikipedia it is documented that Puppy 0.6 needs only 48MB RAM to run as a liveCD.

But I am interested to learn some more from you.
You said deli linux 16MB?
Please which version?
Does it run as a liveCD also? (or how did you install?)
Which programs are included?
Which GUI?
Sorry but you made me curious - This would be a real alternative to Win95.

[rokytnji]

Some more minimal distros here. Even unmaintained ones.

Here

[computerophil]

Some more minimal distros here. Even unmaintained ones.

Here

Thank you - but (there is always a but...)
I know this page sorry that it isn't kept up to date. So most of those links wouldn't work anymore.
Even with distroWatch you can find names of distributions - it is senseless.

With Digit it is different he says he has expirence with deli linux and 16 MB RAM.
First this is already information in the other lists you usually don't have the minimum requironments.
Secondly when he already tried it out he can share the knowledge with us and that is much better than just knowing XY is a Floppydistribution and nothing more.

[elija]

Bloat is in the eye of the beholder. I'm not a pack-rat, so if a computer ceases to be useful with modern operating systems I generally donate it to charity. Though lately my life has been much too busy for computer fiddling.

I agree with that although I do keep a few oldies around for playing.

Old operating systems are unsupported and have well known vulnerabilities. Knowing how good some of the guys I work with are at getting into such systems. No thanks!

My oldest at the moment is an AMD Athlon K6 II which is running INX (not an old os) just to play and see how cool things can be without X