[SWLUG] Linux on an ancient box

[Mark Henderson]

On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 13:59:57 GMT, Gareth Watkins  
<gw at garethwatkins.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> Because of work & ignorance, I have to use Windows most of the time. But
> I've been so bothered by hackers lately (they seem to be waiting there &
> turn up within a minute or two, but the firewall blocks some or all of
> them) that I'd like to have a browsing-only PC.

It's probably just bots scanning the net for unpatched servers...

> I've got some old PCs,
> e.g. a P-100 with about 90Mb RAM.
> Can anyone suggest a small Linux system that would run a browser (over a
> 56K modem) on a PC as primitive as that? (I have RedHat CDs going back
> quite a long way, & Mozillas.) And what browser? (Not e.g. Lynx, because
> pictures are sometimes useful.)
> Or could I do a custom install of FC2 that would give me a bare minimum
> of what I need? Does anybody know of an absolutely minimal list of
> essential applications? I just want to look at web pages (without
> viewing videos etc) and occasionally download files.
> Any ideas?

I have several old PCs too (mostly pentium sub 150MHz, and less than 64MB  
RAM. As far as a minimal install goes, that depends on the distro you use,  
and how big your hdd is. I use Slackware 9.1 (the second latest - 10.0 is  
out) and it runs fine on everything from my P75/48M  right through to my  
1.8GHz Athlon). It all depends what you run on it - I use KDE 3 on the  
athlon, but once tried that on the P75 and gave up after it had been  
loading for 45 mins!

If you're short of hdd space, slack lets you do an install where you can  
choose what you want installed, so with a little bit of reading up, you  
should be able to get a nice small OS. Other distros will have the same,  
too. Of course, the whole disto is made up of packages, so after install,  
you can add/remove any as you need to.

So what would I recommend?

I'd suggest a newer distro - slack is good - it's fairly minimal, but  
you'll probably need to get your hands dirty - no RPMs and such (by  
default). A newer distro, so you have all the latest patches and things -  
if you keep your applications and daemons minimal, it will run fine.

Personally, I don't really use x-windows on my older boxes, as I stick 'em  
in a corner and SSH/telnet into them, but don't even think about  
KDE/Gnome! Something small and minimal like fluxbox (or  
blackbox/whitebox), icewm or fvwm is what you want.

Browsers, again, something newer if you can so you can view pages using  
XHTML and such like, and also you can keep it patched. I don't really know  
- Firefox might be OK, but there's probably much more minimal ones out  
there, instead.

That's my tuppence...

HTH,

Mark

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