[SC.LUG] Old distros and stuff

[Cockroft, John]

I have a *very* old laptop which is

Pentium Classic 90MHz
48Mb RAM
2Gb hard disk
Trident 800x600 graphics

and this runs Slackware 10.0 very nicely (Xfce graphical desktop) and
can run office apps (one at a time) very nicely.  It also runs Konqueror
and even Firefox (with a stuggle) OK.

One of the best distros for low powered hardware is Slackware
(http://www.slackware.org).  

It is not quite as friendly as Fedora, Knoppix or Mandriva in terms of
installation but runs fine on just about anything over an 80386 with
16Mb RAM (although you need over 32Mb to get any form of X-Windows
running).

I had a slight boot problem in that the laptop had a slot for either a
floppy or CD-ROM but not both and originally had Windows 95 running on
it.  I had an old parallel port ZIP drive and managed to get ZIPslack
running in a small partition and then used this to install Slackware
10.0

Xfce is a good Window Manager to pick for low powered machines.
http://www.xfce.org/ 

Slackware Home
http://www.slackware.org/  

ZipSlack Home
http://www.slackware.com/zipslack/ 

Download Slackware ISO

ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.slackware.com/slackware-10.1-iso/slackw
are-10.1-install-d1.iso 

ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.slackware.com/slackware-10.1-iso/slackw
are-10.1-install-d2.iso 

Hope this helps.

John.

-----Original Message-----
From: John Southern [mailto:john at sinoda.demon.co.uk] 
Sent: 24 August 2005 01:24
To: South Cheshire GNU/Linux Users
Subject: [SC.LUG] Old distros and stuff

I normally choose Knoppix to throw into a machine to see if the hardware
is 
OK. Unfortunately, today I was trying to resurrect an old laptop. Memory
of 
just 48MB.
Without thinking I threw in Knoppix and forgot about it. One hour later
it had 
finally managed to display a KDE screen. This was something of a shock
as 
96MB is the stated minimum for KDE. Anyway, It was too slow to do
anything 
and failed for what I wanted (to see it this old laptop supported
sound).
I wanted something quick so I threw in Feather Linux. But at 115MB it
was too 
big to load any modules.
Puppy was next. Again failed on modules but on the forums this was a
known 
problem as was the case with DamnSmallLinux, although I had a lot of fun
with 
that distro.

As I only wanted a quick install, I browsed the web to find that in the 
distant past someone had managed to get this chip to work under Mandrake
8.0.

The question is - Where on the web are old distros archived?
I am mainly thinking about RedHat 7.1 etc

I eventually spent thirty minutes going through dusty piles of disks to 
discover a box set of 8.2 which is busy doing a quick install, so I do
not 
actually need any old distros, I am just curious to know if they still
exist 
in the ether.

Has anyone come across the ctangle command for Irix 6.5?
If so, What does it actually do?

Playing with the tiny distros and following on from the last talk, all
seemed 
to use Dillo rather than Galeon, but the also all contained Beaver. This

seems similar in function to a basic Emacs editor but tiny in size.
Anyone 
tried it?

John

Mandrake installed with about a billion packages I did not want and
sound did 
not work. Now off to find out just what module was supposedly added to
make 
it work.