Getting new distros onto old laptops (or old PCs in general)

[Dragonath]

Hi, I'm new here (this is my first post)

I'll start with a little backstory - about a month ago I got an old IBM ThinkPad (year 98 I think) from work, as it was just lying around and I am a poor student who does not want to spend lots of money buying a new one (and can not be arsed to find a cheaper used laptop either). First days of playing around with it showed that it was quite old enough that both DSL and DSL-N (the two versions of Damn Small Linux), nor Ubuntu, Gentoo and Fedora would not install (either failing to boot from CD or showing me a really mangled up desktop that I am sure worked but was not readable). So I turned to older versions of Linux someone had lying around at work, of them Redhat 7.1 installed without a problem.
Now my next step was to update the kernel so it would know how to deal with all those nice things like USB sticks and WiFi cards. However, as gcc was version 2.96 the kernel of course failed to complie.
So I decided to upgrade the compiler, but this turned out to be a bit insane as the compile would nearly always get errors and fail (I've been using linux for only few months now, and installing stuff from the command line is still a bit of an unknown territory for me) - however I did manage to get gcc up to 3.0.

But to the question. What is the easiest way for me to get my laptop running an up-to-date Linux distro?

[abhishek456]

try Xubuntu which is ubuntu based Distro but disighned to run on old systems

Xubuntu Home Page | Xubuntu.org

[daark.child]

You could also try Debian with a lightweight GUI like Fluxbox (or even XFCE depending on your RAM).

[Dragonath]

Hmm I'll try these out. Compiling gcc version by version like an idiot doesn't sound too good. :P

Btw, the stats are 300 mhz P2 and 32 MB RAM and about 4GB of hard drive.

[techieMoe]

Hmm I'll try these out. Compiling gcc version by version like an idiot doesn't sound too good. :P

Btw, the stats are 300 mhz P2 and 32 MB RAM and about 4GB of hard drive.

I have a somewhat similar laptop (P3 450mHz, 64MB RAM, 6GB harddrive) and I found Xubuntu to be a bit too much for it. Could be the onboard graphics chip however. I had my best luck with Damn Small Linux (which is based on Debian).

[Dragonath]

The Xubuntu site tells me I really really really do need 64 MB RAM, so I'm a bit discouraged. :P
I think I am going to try it out, since Damn Small Linux had a serious problem with graphics, I don't think it would work (though I only tried to run it as a Live CD - maybe an install would have better luck?).
Any more ideas?

[russ s.]

I had good luck with puppy linux on an old gateway solo laptop(233mhz, 64mb ram, 4mb graphics card). It wouldn't boot to x without a swap partition though, after I made one it ran well from the live cd and installed easy.

[IsaacKuo]

You're severely limited by 32megs of RAM. 300Mhz is an okay speed, and 4gigs of hard drive space is good...but 32megs of RAM is a severe limitation.

Personally, I'd use it as a dumb X terminal. I currently use a 300Mhz machine as an X terminal logged into my much faster server, and it rocks! Even at 2048x1536 resolution and a mere 100mbit LAN connection, it's as fast and responsive as running locally except for viewing large images (where it's still amazingly fast).

Of course, this only works if you have a faster computer to connect to, and it rather rudely eliminates the portability advantage of a laptop.

Oh well...

If you use Debian, you can get acceptable performance using lightweight applications. You can forget about running Firefox, unfortunately. I've heard that Opera is supposed to be more light weight than Firefox, but I wasn't impressed by Opera on a 48meg Pentium 120 was not a positive one (I went back to Firefox, since both were slow and I prefered Firefox). The basic upshot is that there's no really practical web browser option which will handle modern web sites properly.

My favored combination of lightweight Debian applications is the Icewm window manager with PCManFM for file browser. For really lightweight systems, I'd use the icewm-lite window manager and xfe file browser.

There are a number of unnecessary things you can strip out of a basic Debian install. I don't know them off the top of my head. One thing you'll probably want to deactivate for performance reasons is font anti-aliasing. There are some guides on how to configure Linux fonts to be "Windows-like"--Windows doesn't anti-alias small fonts and many people prefer the Windows jagged look (I'm not one of them; I waited decades for anti-aliased fonts and they're everything I ever hoped they would be!).

[bidi]

For older PCs, I still recommend DeLi Linux! For some reason, people recommend DSL, which is just a LiveCD, but DeLi Linux is built from the ground up to work with older hardware. It uses either JWM or IceWM and comes with a multitude of applications that helps you to be productive on older hardware.

[techieMoe]

For older PCs, I still recommend DeLi Linux! For some reason, people recommend DSL, which is just a LiveCD

Damn Small Linux is a LiveCD, however it can be installed as a regular distribution.

but DeLi Linux is built from the ground up to work with older hardware.

...and comes with a multitude of applications that helps you to be productive on older hardware.

So are Puppy Linux and Vector Linux. I didn't recommend Damn Small because I believed it was the only option. I recommended it because it was the best option for my old laptop, which seems similar to the original poster's hardware.