[dundee] Usable Linux with GUI on old hardware

[Kris Davidson]

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