[Functions]

Hey, I've been donated a nice little dell laptop, latitude. with 128mb ram and 400 Mhz PII

I'd like to put a distro of linux on here but am specifically looking for a single cd variant, (hd space is minimal, +time spent downloading extra cd's)

I used to use slackware a few years ago and loved it, however now they have gone to 4 cd's / whole dvd.

I had a look at zenwalk an single cd offshoot of slack and was impressed however the minimum requirments are above my laptop spec

I like to tinker and I was planning on getting a simple but fully fuctional box running and then put something like fluxbox for an x manager.

Any ideas on a full fledge single cd distro? something akin to slack or debian?

kind regards

[RobinVossen]

Arch, Vector, DSL.. There are lots
You might want to run matchbox as Window Manerger.
Or you might want to run Slax since if I recall correctly its just one cd.

Do you have eth on the laptop?
Since if so Installing it will be a piece of cake with one CD.
Then you can even pick Debian for one cd

Cheers,
Robin

[Functions]

Hi, thanks for the reply. I have no eth at the moment no. I've actually just finalised and installed the 'core' version of zenwalk and everythings gone on ok so I may mess about with this and tack a WM ontop now.

But regardless I shall still have a look at some of the options you mentioned

[valemon]

You can also have a look at the favorite distro for older hardware poll. You can find some useful piece of information there.

[ozar]

Originally Posted by Functions

I've actually just finalised and installed the 'core' version of zenwalk and everythings gone on ok so I may mess about with this and tack a WM ontop now.

Welcome to the forums!

Zenwalk is a really nice lightweight distro, and it was in fact my default distro at one time. I've not tried the last few releases, but probably should experiment with it once again.

[NickWelder]

Well DamnSmallLinux may be a good choice for you but it isn't very complete, and you said that is something you are looking for. I personally love DSL and chose it as my emergency backup distribution that I put on a Flash USB ThumbDrive. It boots and runs very fast and is a very clean distribution. Plus, you can't beat a fully functional distribution of Linux with GUI and everything that comes in a 50mb download!

I just got done testing about 6+ different distributions to run on my Laptop and I settled with PCLinuxOS. It is 1 CD, just under 700mb. It is a very nice complete OS and is very slick and the it runs smooth as butter. I am running it on a 1.73ghz laptop and it runs VERY fast but I don't know how it will manage on a 400mhz dino.

I did NOT like Ubuntu variants at all although many people swear by it. You may want to look into it because it is also about a 700mb download.

Mandriva was _OK_ but overall wasn't the right one for me personally. This would be my 2nd choice next to PCLinuxOS and comes on one CD.

btw, I know that people out there are running barebones versions of Slackware. If Slackware worked for you in the past then you should look into it again. I don't know if you have to build your own distribution off the 4CDs or if there is one available for download that is slimmed down. I am sure somebody here will have an answer about that for you.

PuppyDogLinux is supposed to be a nice distribution for older PCs, but I couldn't get it to boot up so I didn't get to try it out for myself but it appears to be a promising little distribution. It looks like it would be a nice competitor to DamnSmallLinux but with more features and more packages preinstalled. It's about 100mb too which is nice.

Let us know what you settled with and how it all comes together in the end.

Also, what size HD do you have?

[giant_slacker87]

hmm...I suppose you could try Puppy linux, supposedly it runs only in RAM. Damn Small Linux works as well.

Check DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. they have information on most linux distros


What is your hard drive specs?