Distro for Older Hardware

[Jon Pruente]

I say it's your RAM slowing you down.  You should be able to handle
DSL ro PUppy well on that amount of RAM, but a regular Ubuntu install
won't, which is what goes in even with the Alternate CD, unless you do
a command-line install.  The Alternate CD will do a full install with
out needing the 192MB of RAM to boot the LiveCD to do the same thing.
If you do a command-line install, and then add a custom set of
packages, you can trim it down a lot.

Of course for tips see:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/LowMemorySystems

I'll third DSL and Puppy Linux.  Also, I've run the BSDs before and
they can be made quite small.  It's been a while, but I used to run a
Mac IIsi with NetBSD in 5MB RAM and an 80MB HDD.  Of course it was
basically only a dial-up PPP gateway, but it worked.

Jon.

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.