Which distro?

[jodymac]

hi all

a friend of mine has 1 of these

Toshiba Satellite 4010CDT - PII 266 MHz - 12.1" TFT : Read reviews and compare prices at Ciao.co.uk

yes its a p 2, yes it has 32 mb ram and yes it has a 4gb drive !!!!

any suggestions for a distro ???

i have used ubuntu, linux mint, vixta etc before, but i don't think it will run them lol


any help appreciated

cheers

jody

[khafa]

hi,


Damn Small Linux might be your perfect match.
have a look at its documentation and have fun with it.
by the way minimum required RAM is 8Mb for DSL(tha is power right there).

[Jonathan183]

Welcome to the forums jodymac

My distro suggestion is DSL.

You can check the distro poll here.

[Taltos]

I have not tried DSL, so I can't say one way or the other whether it would be appropriate, but I do think you should be looking toward the lightweight class of distros in which DSL resides (or perhaps founded?).

I didn't try DSL because from what I heard it used Fluxbox, and that always seemed weird to me. I was rather impressed with Puppy and its JWM interface, but I've heard that the newest version of DSL also comes with JWM so I might go back and give it a try afterall.

Puppy ran pretty well for me. Its only 88mb and loads completely into RAM, so it ran really well on a machine that only had 256mb of ram. Even though you only have 32mb, I think puppy will run well for you. What most impressed me about Puppy was that it was able to play almost all of my media without additional configuration from me.

Puppy can also be run effectively from the CD, only storing additional information on the hard drive (or usb drive) as needed when you add programs, change configurations settings, etc.

You can also re-master Puppy fairly easily after you install your programs and change your settings, so that you have your own custom Puppy that can be run off the CD. This assumes you have access to a cd burner, of course.

I would recommend any lightweight distro that used the JWM or Xfce desktop. I would take a look at Puppy and/or DSL, even if you choose not to use it, so that you can see what kind of 'lightweight' programs you should be using, even if you go with a different desktop.

I would also recommend picking a lightweight distro that can be loaded into RAM, provided that it is small enough, and provided that you are willing to educate yourself on some of the special issues this entails.

My recommendations are:

Puppy Linux
Wolvix GNU/Linux

[Dapper Dan]

DeLi Linux is another 2.4 kernel distro (like DSL) that purports to be suitable for older hardware with minimal specs.