2009/11/3 Michael G <[email protected]>: >> I know that there are many gnu/linux distributions which can no longer >> even be installed on very old computers because of their size and/or >> distribution method; can you recommend any of the 100% free >> distributions for this purpose?
> Depends on how you define "old". On a 10 year old system (say, a > Pentium II with 128 mb of ram) you can easily run the current version > of Debian even with the not bad-looking LXDE gui. In my experience, the sticking point is not CPU, even a P-II does fine - it's memory. KDE or GNOME are going to be a world of pain in 256MB, you want at least 512MB and preferably as absolutely much as will physically fit (typically 1024MB on motherboards of the time). A smaller DE would of course be better. As a practical usable machine, the main problem I find is that Firefox is way too fat these days. If you don't want a web browser, your life is much easier with memory. I was recently using an ancient Thinkpad 560X as the household server - Pentium MMX 233MHz (not P-II, original Pentium), 96MB memory and Debian squeeze in command-line mode, no X at all. It served the contents of a large USB disk over SMB and recorded sound from the USB turntable and the cassette deck hooked to it quite well. - d. _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list [email protected] https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
