Old Compter,which distro ?

[Epicleptic]

Hi, I have a pentium II laptop wich really struggles with Win XP Pro. Too Slow. Im thinking about puppy or damn small linux. Do these OS come with a user interface like KDE or Gnome or something similar ?

Can puppy be installed rather than run on live CD ?

Thanks,

Mick.

[jayd512]

Hello and Welcome!

Puppy can be installed, as can Damn Small. That hardware would really crawl with either KDE or Gnome, but there are plenty of attractive options out there.
You might want to check this poll for some popular opinions on what might be good for your machine.

[Epicleptic]

Thanks Ill follow the link.. Are you saying there are Graphic user interface options that will on my laptop ?

Thank you,

Mick.

PS its a Pentium III

[vrkalak]

I have an older laptop, that will no longer install XP, even from the CD.
When it does have XP working, the images are jerky when scrolling and it doesn't even recognize its own Wifi hardware or drivers.

The smaller Linux-based OSs brought it back to life. Everything works!!

My recommendations would be either Anti-X (with Fluxbox)
or Puppy Linux with either Xfce or JWM.

Both are very light-weight and easy to install and configure.
They have everything the larger OSs have.

And Xfce or Flubox are lightening fast on my old Lappy.

[jayd512]

First computer that I put Linux on was a PIII coppermine with 512 RAM.
It was faster than XP from the get go, and that was with Gnome. Once I move to a lightweight WM (IceWM, it was like greased lightning!)
There are others, though, that are good for older kit: Xfce, Openbox, JWM, etc.
Check this out, as well: Window Managers for X

[oz]

Welcome to the forums!

XFCE4 or LXDE might work fast enough, but any of the *boxes, such as Fluxbox or Openbox should work well on a Pentium 3. Pekwm is another window manager that might work well enough for you.

[Epicleptic]

Should I choose Puppy, does the install give you options on what GUI you can install such as

Xfce or JWM.

Flubox


Pekwm

or others ?

Mike.

[jayd512]

The default for Puppy is JWM.
If you want to get a quick look at what it looks like, check out the Distrowatch page on it.

[Digital_Resistance]

The smaller Linux-based OSs brought it back to life. Everything works!!

It's amazing what they can do. To think of all of the computers gathering dust, or worse, releasing toxins into the environment, that could be put to good use. Such waste.

My recommendations would be either Anti-X (with Fluxbox)
or Puppy Linux with either Xfce or JWM.

Anti-X MEPIS has been running quite nicely from live CD on my 850 MHZ P III Dell Latitude C600 with 384 MB of RAM.

With 256 MB RAM, I had to severely limit the number windows and tabs I kept open at once in both Iceweasel as well as AbiWord. Otherwise, there would be sudden crashes in which all open windows and tabs would just vanish without a trace.

(I would think this was likely due to the greater RAM consumption that running as live CD causes; might not have happened with an install to hard drive.)

Puppy Linux booted and ran on this ten-year-old laptop as well but I had this bizarre problem with SeaMonkey (the included Mozilla browser) where pages would just spontaneously jump back and forward*.

Even if not for that, however, I still would not have liked SeaMonkey.

Beyond all of this, the unique way in which Puppy runs as root is a major security concern to me. (even just for temporary live CD/USB use and even in a computer without any hard drive, such as my C600 at the time. Why, you ask? Hardware rootkits/ BIOS exploit.)

They have everything the larger OSs have.

I don't see how you could say that.

antiX and Puppy certainly pack in a lot for their small foot (or paw) prints but there's no way that either one could have everything that a much larger OS does.

By definition, anything minimalist will not offer as much as something standard or full-featured.

*I wonder if the problem with SeaMonkey jumping between pages might be related to either or both of the following problems I've had with this laptop:
-mouse-drift, a known hardware issue for the C600, which I experienced erratically under Win 2K but did not experience in Puppy.

- chronic cursor jump while I type- irrespective of OS

[SA.com]

Hi, I have a pentium II laptop wich really struggles with Win XP Pro. Too Slow. Im thinking about puppy or damn small linux. Do these OS come with a user interface like KDE or Gnome or something similar ?

Can puppy be installed rather than run on live CD ?

Thanks,

Mick.

Yes it can.

Iǘe recently tried Puppy, not my bag really, but it does have some really cool / unique features in it.

Great for beginners that need to have the set up explained to them. [I'm sure no expert either, check out some of my stupid q's in some of my posts]. Puppy is simple and fairly straight forward.

Good Luck !