Lan Barnes wrote:
My nephew is interested in putting Linux on an older box. Can anyone
recommend a distro? I could send him a copy of RH 6.2. Anything newer that
would fit on this?
HIS SPECS:
Processor: 533 MHz Celeron
Memory: 128 MB SDRam (maxed out for one memory slot; second slot damaged)
Hard Drive: Nominally 10.2 GB (HP specs), Windows says 9.5 MB.
Two distro's that come to mind are Puppy Linux <http://www.puppyos.com>
and DamnSmall Linux <http://http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/>. I prefer
Puppy Linux because of its user support and packaging system [1].
Both of these distributions are designed to run directly from RAM if you
have at least 128MB (which he does). The Puppy distro is using a 2.6.x
kernel while the DSL version is still on a 2.4.x series kernel. I doubt
it will make much difference on his hardware.
I have a shoebox computer with a Celeron 400MHz processor and 256MB RAM
with a generic CirrusLogic video chip and Puppy Linux runs great. The
Mozilla web browser works fine but you aren't going to be able to run
any of the plugins like Flash or Java [2].
Gus
[1] The packaging system is not like Debian DEB or Redhat RPM. It's more
along the lines of a tarball with a XML manifest, which works well enough.
[2] Actually, I'm not sure because I haven't tried it, but Flash can
bring my Athlon XP 1800 to its knees so I think the Celeron will
probably suffer.
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