[Wolves] Linux on an old PC

[Adam Sweet]

--- Kevanf1 <kevanf1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Has anybody succesfully run SuSe 9.2 on an old PC? 
> It's not for me
> but somebody asked me  if it were possible?  They
> have tried using a
> PC running 196mb of RAM together with a 166 Pentium
> MMX chip.  The PC
> hangs so far into the install and goes no further. 
> I'm pretty sure
> 9.2 ought to run on a 166 but maybe not.  Or could
> it be something
> else preventing it?  I've got an old PC with a 166
> MMX myself and had
> thought of running SuSE on this.  Perhaps it's not a
> good idea?  This
> chap has run other distros succesfully on this
> particular PC by the
> way so it's not the Machinery that's actually
> broken....perhaps not
> quite up to the job.

Most of the weight will be in the windowing
environment. X, your desktop environment/window
manager and the apps you choose.

Theoretically it should be do-able with a light weight
window manager like XFCE (or one of the other million)
and office apps like Abiword. You could at least try.
KDE, Gnome and OpenOffice.org would probably be too
painful.

Would be interesting to hear how you get on. You could
try to run a thin client too, run your apps on a
powerful machine and display them on your old box but
is it worth the aggro to learn how to do it?

The memory is probably ok but the processor speed
would be the hold up when doing stuff. If you wanted a
plain old console login then you would be fine to run
Apache, MySQL and other such services, in fact it
would make a great home server if you wanted to do
that.

If you get it up, let me know how it fares. Have a
look at the Morphix Light GUI or Damn Small Linux live
CDs to see how light is usable.

Why that particular machine won't install SuSE, well
who knows. Often in an installation routine, they
provide a virtual console (F2 or F3 etc) so you can
see what is going on.

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