Linux for 2001 Dell Laptop 64 Meg of Ram

[vicmorrowsghost]

Hi I've recently picked up a free Dell Inspiron 4000 with

700mhz
64meg of ram
4 gig HDD

I'm just wanting to use it as a web surfing device.
It's currently got Windows 98 and runs ok but it has no service packs or updates so going online would be suiside.

I was wondering if there is a light weight version Linux out there that could run Firefox?

Thanks.

[monday90]

You could try something like Puppy or Damn Small Linux. I'm not sure if either comes with Firefox but it would be easy enough to install. Pretty much anything with an XFCE desktop should do it. Maybe even Xubuntu.

[monday90]

In fact thinking about it Xubuntu would probably die on it. It needs too much RAM.

[vicmorrowsghost]

Puppy or Damn Small Linux.

I read a bit about Puppy that looks like it might get it done.

"XFCE desktop" I have no idea what this is but I'm Googleing it now.

[coopstah13]

I think xfce is too much for that too, its not really that much lighter than gnome/kde. You probably will need to use something like fluxbox, openbox, fvwm. As for firefox, that might also not go too well, but you can try.

[monday90]

Just spotted Tinycore. Looking at it that is probably your best shot.

[vicmorrowsghost]

Just spotted Tinycore. Looking at it that is probably your best shot.

Trying Puppy now but if it doesn't work I'll have a look at that thanks.

[vicmorrowsghost]

Ok so puppy isn't working well at all.

It's running so slowly I can't type a url with out it pausing halfway through for a couple of seconds. I've just tried to load google.com and it took 75 seconds of furious HDD ratteling to come up.

I'm quite surprised, I was expecting it to trade off some user friendlyness for a slight performance increase but I don't think it's even running as well as Windows 98 was.

Looking at tinycore but it's pretty dense.
I'm staggered that perhaps 11 year old windows wasn't that bad.

[vicmorrowsghost]

Looks like the winner is Damn Small Linux.
It was pretty easy to set up and it runs great.
After booting it's 18meg in memory leaving me with plenty spare to do things.
Connected to the net net through the lan automatically and came with firefox installed.

Awesome.

[Zeroangel]

Also, consider installing Kazehakase as your browser. IMO, it is the most feature packed lightweight browser available. On startup it consumes less than 10MB of RAM.