Chuck Zmudzinski writes:
On 2/7/2022 4:36 PM, Greg Wooledge wrote:On Mon, Feb 07, 2022 at 04:31:51PM -0500, Chuck Zmudzinski wrote:On 2/7/2022 10:50 AM, William Lee Valentine wrote:I am wondering whether a current Debian distribution can be installed and run on an older Pentium III computer. (I have Debian 11.2 on a DVD.)The computer is Dell Dimension XPS T500: Intel Pentium III processor (Katnai) memory: 756 megabytes, running at 500 megahertz IDE disc drive: 60 gigabytes Debian partition: currently 42 gigabytes Debian 6.0: SqueezeBased on what others are saying, it looks like a typical modern Debian desktop environment such as Gnome or Plasma KDE will not work well with such an old system. I suggest you look for a Distro that is tailored for old hardware.Bah, silly. Just use a traditional window manager instead of a bloated Desktop Environment. Problem solved.Which windows manager for an extremely resource-limited system? Debian's
One could use one of e.g. the following list: - IceWM - i3 - FluxboxAll of them are packaged for Debian and work on low-resource computers. I have successfully deployed i3 on a system with similar specs to the OP's. Mine is still on Debian 10 and not upgraded to Debian 11 yet, though.
wiki page on window managers lists more than 30 possibilities. Its not silly to take a look at a distro based on Debian that is tailored for low resources as a starting point to try and build a Debian 11.2 system that will work OK on a Pentium III with less than 1 GB of memory. Debian provides
Of course, its a valid approach :)
so many packages, and such distros like antiX can give one an idea about which packages to use when trying to build a Debian 11.2 system that will work well on an older system with such a small amount of memory and such an old CPU.
The other option is to ask here for recommendations. Debian is one of the last large/mainstream distributions to still support i386 architecture hence it is not unlikely that some people will be running old hardware here (I do for instance :) ).
But the *real* problem will come when they try to run a web browser. That's where the truly massive memory demand is. 756 MB is plenty of RAM for daily use of everything except a web browser.Yes, it will be important to try to find a web browser that is the least bloated as possible. Again, looking at the browser choices of distros tailored for old hardware can help build a Debian 11.2 system that will work well on old hardware.
Independent of the other distros one will need to do a compromise here because:
* Any browser supporting all the modern features (mostly JS and CSS3) will be too slow for such old a machine. * Any other browser will be too limited in features to satisfy a modern user's needs. E.g. try to access Gmail or Youtube over any lightweight browser and see how it goes (I suspect it will not work _at all_!)
In any case, it will need to be a carefully crafted selection of Debian 11.2 packages to have a decent experience, and most definitely start with a small netinst installation with only the text console to start, and then build the GUI environment carefully from the ground up.
On such an old system one should only install what is needed because any additional background service will reduce the already very limited computational capacity. Rather than crafting a set of applications it might be easier to start with the question what the machine is going to be used for and then figure out if this is even possible for the hardware and only afterwards check which applications will fit the purpose _and_ resource constraints.
E.g. I regularly run `maxima` as a "calculator" app. On an old machine it takes many seconds to run and to compute even simple expressions. Hence I switched to `sc-im` (a lightweight spreadsheet program) on old machines for such tasks.
HTH and YMMV Linux-Fan öö [...]
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