[dundee] Usable Linux with GUI on old hardware

[Christopher Wyllie]

Hey,

Perhaps checkout elive (www.elivecd.org). It looks shiny and here's the
minimum quoted requirements:

"The minimum hardware for running Elive is a 100 Mhz CPU and 64 MB of RAM,
but the minimum recommended hardware is 300 Mhz and 128 Mb of RAM. You do
not need any special graphics card or 3D acceleration to run Elive. "

It looks good and runs pretty smoothly. I suggest using the development
version for a couple of reasons:

1. It's not needing a donation to download
2. It's based on debian lenny, not etch
3. It runs just as stably as the 'stable' version and with a dist-upgrade it
can be upgraded when the next stable comes out

It's a live CD so you could try it out, or install it. There's even an
option to install with a compressed file system for systems which have tiny
disks.

Good luck!
  Chris

On 3 February 2010 08:35, Kris Davidson <davidson.kris at gmail.com> wrote:

> Haven't been trying for long, but yesterday afternoon I tried to get
> Linux with a GUI running on three old IBM Thinkpad 380XD laptops. The
> specs are:
>
> Intel Pentium 2 233MHz
> 64 MB RAM
> 3.2GB HD
> 2MB Graphics Card
>
> The distros I've tried or have downloaded to consider trying are:
>
> Damn Small Linux
> Damn Small Linux Not
> Puppy
> TurboPup
> Deli
> Feather
> VectorLinux
> BasicLinux (I just wanted to try this out, not really practical)
>
> Ideally they should be able to browse the Internet, open PDF and Word
> documents and possibly open PPTs / run a presentation. That last one
> might be an issue, from what I can see there are three options run a
> viewer in Wine, Install Open Office or Install Java and run a viewer.
> Seems theres no lightweight PPT viewer. I'm pretty sure the RAM is the
> bottleneck, plus an added problem is the guy I'm doing this for has
> his mind set on Puppy after seeing the GUI.
>
> Puppy seems to take 3-5 minutes to boot, I've done an HD install and
> continue to play around with it.
>
> I've considered doing a minimal Debian install (even considered
> Slackware or Gentoo) and seeing what I can bring up from there.
>
> Anyway just wondering if anyone had any advice, success stories,
> opinions, whatever really.
>
> Kris
>
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