[Wolves] Suggest an OS

[Zeth Green]

On 04/09/07, Tim Childe <tim.childe.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi guys, time to de-lurk to ask a question ;-)

Hi welcome out of the shadows!

> I've got an old laptop that I want to re-install the OS for - but not sure
> which to try.  I've tried a couple of Live versions of linux, but had little
> success.

Yeah sadly many LiveCD distributions are rather heavy and require at
least 256MB to get any kind of reaction from. The Gentoo minimal CD
should work though, but as the name suggests, it does not have that
much in the way of programs.

I thought i'd take advice / recomendations before wiping the
> current system.
>
> It's an IBM 760 ED, Pentium 133? with 64Mb of Ram
>
> It's currently running win98SE - which was fine until I made the mistake of
> upgrading to IE6, then it slowed to a crawl.
> As I'm going to have to wipe and reinstall to remove IE6 and other stuff I
> stupidly put on there, I might as well try and get a better OS if there is
> one.
>
> Suggestions ??

I personally ran a very similar system as my main laptop until
September 2006. I used the command line programs for email (Mutt),
writing text (Emacs), and reading news websites (Elinks). When I
wanted to look at websites that required pictures, for example,
friends' photo galleries, I launched the Ratpoison Window manager
which I set to automatically start the Epiphany web browser (Firefox
needed too much RAM).

If that is better or worse than Windows 98 is a matter of personal
preference I suppose. For me, the set up I had on my old laptop was
not that dissimilar to the set up I have now with dual cores and 2GB
or RAM on the desktop. Although I use Gnome rather than ratpoision, I
still use all the same programs.

If you try something like this, use a distro that is compiled for i386
rather than i686, e.g. Slackware, Deli Linux and so on. (I used
Gentoo, and when it came to updates I would use distcc which means
that a nearby desktop would compile the apps).

If you install a distro compiled for i686 (Pentium II and above) on a
Pentium I then you may find a number of problems. That rules out all
the trendy ones such as Ubuntu and Fedora.

Best Wishes,
Zeth