Distro for Older Hardware

[djgoku]

On 4/4/07, Jonathan Hutchins <hutchins at tarcanfel.org> wrote:
> 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?

It isn't a distro, but (I would recommend OpenBSD) have OpenBSD
installed on a 200Mhz, dual 300Mhz, 500Mhz, all humming along running
3.9/4.0 variants at the moment.

If you need any help in configuring I would help in any way I know of.

Jonathan