Lightest, Smallest Pentium II or III Laptop You Have Running Linux?

[JordanStorm]

I'm interested in getting one or two more very small, very light laptops to run just wordprocessing and .mp3 player, preferably on OpenOffice (not just Abiword). I need a 12" screen and 1024x768 screen res (not a 10.1 with 800x600).

Anyone runnng something with a small/fast distro on a very thin/light laptop?

~jordan

[djsteiner]

im running dynebolic on an ancient IBM thinkpad pentium 2, its very light and dynebolic runs very fast on this computer (much faster than when the computer was running windows 98 *shudder*) Dynebolic is also great if the computers are networked because it automatically clusters networked compters.

[JordanStorm]

im running dynebolic on an ancient IBM thinkpad pentium 2, its very light and dynebolic runs very fast on this computer (much faster than when the computer was running windows 98 *shudder*) Dynebolic is also great if the computers are networked because it automatically clusters networked compters.

Which Thinkpad? A 600? 600e? How much ram?

TIA!

~jordan

[djsteiner]

yes, i think it's a 600e with 64mb ram

[Norcal_linux]

Hello,

I am working on a smaller screen than what you desire (I'm on 12.1 @ 800x600), but my small and underpowered laptop does surprisingly well. I am on a Thinkpad 390X, 400mhz celeron processor, 256mb ram, 4.5gb hddd, wi-fi working, and it does the job for me. I work on research papers in open office, listen to mp3's, work on my online college classes, keep up on e-mail and news. I am using Ubuntu 6.06, and i don't feel any major lag when opening programs or surfing the web. Open office does take a bit to load, but once loaded its fine. Its a 400mhz processor, but I would have guessed 600 - 800 mhz in Ubuntu. It doesn't seem as bloated as when I used Mandrake or RedHat. I got the laptop for free because someone was throwing it away because it was "use-less and underpowered, outdated". I have been using it for 3 years now. Its like a rocket when using a small distro like damn_small_linux. Anyway, I hope you find a good laptop that works for you, its nice to see someone asking about older machines, and breathing new life into them. Have a good day.

-Eric-

[valemon]

I have an old HP omnibook xe3 600MHz @ 64Mb and running vector linux.
Having 128Mb ram will greatly benefit your system. Although I am using XFCE as a windows manager and seamonkey instead of firefox, my system is a bit slow.

[raymac46]

and I run Vector Linux 5.8 on it. It is a Pentium II 266 and I maxed out the RAM at 160 Mb. This is well worth doing on an old machine as 128 Mb of memory cost me only $25 or so Canadian. Some Linux distros require at least 128 Mb to run.
I didn't try Open Office as I have another desktop machine with 512 Mb of RAM that runs Linux much faster.

[bob_the_tomato]

Hi,

I have a Compaq Evo N410c which is a great little machine. PIII 1.2Ghz, 256Mb Ram, 12" screen (1024 x 768 ). I have it running Fedora 4, which probably isn't the smallest version of Linux, but it runs pretty well. It takes a while to boot and load some applications (open office being one of them) but I hope another 256Mb of Ram will fix that. I'm still setting it up, but hardware wise, it is great.

[timsclips]

Using Mint 2.2 with XFce desktop on an old Dell Lattitude CSx, 500mhz and 256mb of ram. This is a 14" screen lightweight, does not have built in floppy or cd drive. Runs fair, Mint was not a lightweight dist, mostly the same as Ubuntu, but included linux drivers for several chipsets that other distributions did not have.

[cayalee]

was running a pII 233mhz 64mb ram laptop (hp omnibook 2100) on damn small linux (DSL) v1.2 i think, and could run openoffice on it quite happily. had some issues with soundcard but the guys on the forums got it sorted so that i could use it for cd and web streaming