Distro for Older Hardware

[Jonathan Hutchins]

I have an old laptop, IBM Thinkpad 380 Z, that had Mandrake 9.1 installed and 
running reasonably.  It's a low-power system, with only a 300MHz PII, 96M of 
ram, and a 3G hard drive, but it ran Mandrake reasonably well.

Unfortunately, support for 9.1 is no longer available (with good reason, great 
advances have been made), and that means I can't set up either of my wireless 
cards, at least not easily.

I decided to try Kubuntu on it, and used the Alternate CD that's supposed to 
allow for older. less powerful systems.  The results are pretty poor.  The 
install didn't check to see that I'd passed a custom option to the kernel so 
it could boot (ide=nodma).  It didn't detect the sound system at all (ubuntu 
seems to be having some serious problems with sound these days).  It failed 
to detect the CardBus ethernet card at boot, although I was able to configure 
it.  It doesn't appear to have adjusted it's package selection by much; I had 
to remove OpenOffice to get enough space to run the initial package update.  
The install took around eight hours to complete, the package update just 
finished after over an hour.

I really haven't had a chance to give the system a fair chance yet, but 
looking at how long the text-mode update took, I'm not optimistic.

I have the CD for DamnSmallLinux, and I will probably try that next.  I know 
some of you have built linux systems on older hardware, and I'd like to know 
what you'd recommend for a system of this vintage.  Surely there's something 
as capable today as Mandrake was five (?) years ago?