Distro for aging laptop -- bootable CD?

[Leo J Mauler]

I go to a local thrift store at 67th & Nieman Rd. (behind "StoneBridge"
wines and fine foods) for food assistance, and when I was last there I
saw that someone had donated several older versions of Linux, boxed sets.
 There were older SuSE, RedHat, and Mandrake versions there.  That thrift
store (want to say its called "Community Senior Services" but could be
wrong) also gets a lot of computer donations in the form of PCs, Macs,
keyboards, and monitors, and they don't charge an arm and a leg for them
like some other thrift stores I might mention.  If you pick up a used 15"
SVGA monitor and ask for a price, chances are you'll get it for $10-$15. 
Same goes for computers and suchlike.  You can even get the computer desk
while you're there.  Bread is free, as always.

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On Sun, 14 Dec 2003 15:45:00 -0600 Bradley Miller
<bradmiller_kclug at sbcglobal.net> writes:
> I've got a P233 Toshiba with 96Mb in it.  

> Mandrake "Move" requires at least 128Mb of memory. 
> Does anyone know of a similar distro that will boot up 
> and occupy less space?  There once was the DemoLinux 
> CD's, but I don't think I ever had one boot up on a laptop 
> right.  I've got a 4 gig drive in the laptop, so I could 
> theoretically install two OS systems . . . but I'm still torn 
> on that prospect.  I do need to do a new install on that 
> box because of a virus on it . . . but I'm not energetic 
> enough to try it.  I still need Windows capability on it.

Someone on here said you can do X and a lot of other stuff using Debian
installs and still manage to get everything in under 500MB with swap. 
However, you've mentioned not being energetic enough to do a Windows
re-install, so Debian might be a little harder than that to manage.

KNOPPIX isn't too bad on a P233Mhz, though I've only used Knoppix v3.1 on
such a machine.  Boots up like DemoLinux and doesn't change anything on
the hard drive (though you can tell it to use a swap file for more RAM).

Slackware still does a ZipSlack, and I haven't checked to see if BigSlack
is still around.  ZipSlack is a minimal Linux install (under 100MB) of
the latest Slackware distro, but with enough tools to use it as a big
rescue disk or even do some things in Linux.  BigSlack does the same
thing only in 1GB of space and is a nearly full install including X.  Why
both are handy is that both use the UMSDOS filesystem, which is
essentially FAT32 with some extensions which are invisible to a Windows
OS.  In other words, if you decompress ZipSlack/BigSlack into a Windows
partition (or even subdirectory), you can continue to use Windows without
any real changes to the system.  When you reboot into Linux, the system
works with the UMSDOS extensions and changes nothing on the hard drive
except files within the C:LINUX subdirectory.  You can mount partitions
other than the one that the UMSDOS (C:LINUX) filesystem is running on,
but the base UMSDOS partition is invisible to mount (its already mounted
as /). Since UMSDOS has nearly the same limitations as FAT32, its not an
ideal situation, but it works okay for "testing out" Linux.  BigSlack
would be the best for trying out Linux as it contains X as well.  Adding
X to ZipSlack is a bit too hard for the average beginning user (having
done it once, ouch).

Also try out DamnSmallLinux.  At 50MB with X, its not a bad deal.  Comes
with a number of tools and applications as well.  I haven't had any luck
booting it from a miniCD (most of my CDROM drives are picky) but someone
with a better brand of miniCD might have a better time of it.  Burn it to
a regular CD to be sure.

If you get around to installing an OS, Slackware and Debian still use
text-based installers as their primary installers, so they'll run fast on
any machine with less than 128MB RAM.  RedHat and Mandrake installers are
graphical for the most part (their text-based installers act like
afterthoughts rather than active parts of the distros) though sometimes
they have the option for initiating a swap file to allow the
RedHat/Mandrake graphical installer to function.

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