I have an ancient CTX pc with a Pentium MMX cpu and 64MB of memory. I’d like to throw some lightweight linux variant on it for my little brother to practice typing. I don’t need anything fancy, just a graphical desktop and a text editor. The machine is not worth upgrading, so I was thinking some old linux variant might do the trick (the thing used to run Win95).
Any suggestions? I doubt openSUSE is going to fit the bill here, or any established distro. However, I found an article on linux.com from zonker on using linux on a machine with similar specs. Slackware and Debian did pretty well apparently. It doesn’t have an ethernet port so there’s no internet.
and then choose the minimal window manager instead of the usual gnome or kde, and that should put a very light X and the IceWM window manager on board.
If the default TWM window manager shows up, you may have to force IceWM by editing /etc/sysconfig/windowmanager
# Here you can set the default window manager (kde, fvwm, ...)
# changes here require at least a re-login
# DEFAULT_WM="twm"
DEFAULT_WM="icewm-session"
Now you can use the included Mousepad editor, or perhaps install the nano editor for use inside an xterm.
For printing, cups is included with the minimal install, so you can set it up via the browser (albeit slowly), or perhaps install elinks, and use that to access cups.
You may not have to look any further than openSuse herself!
Good suggestion. I might try it once I get my hands on the 11.1 discs. Is it still possible to download the individual CDs? This machine doesn’t have a DVD drive.
Tried Puppy and Kwort but neither would install GRUB succesfully to the MBR.
No, OpenSUSE hasn’t been split into CDs for a few releases now. There are single KDE and GNOME LiveCDs, but you might have trouble booting those. I don’t like your chances with 64MB.
Distrowatch has a list of small distributions. Another one to consider is slitaz.
If you don’t get any satisfaction and the machine is a desktop, please recycle the machine as a router/firewall or something like that or put it out of its misery, for the sake of carbon emissions. An old machine consumes about the same amount of power as a modern one. (Provided you are not running some red-hot graphics card.) If it’s a laptop, there might be some merit in installing a tiny distro on it, but then often the rechargeable batteries are dead so you would have to not mind connecting a power pack to it all the time. Power consumption is lower than a desktop though.
Taking your advice. I just found out that the PS/2 port is dead. Playing with ancient pc’s is good for the geek spirit but not quite practical, I suppose. I just remembered I have an old Dell Latitude sitting in my closet that’ll do what I want (it’s keyboard is busted, but I can plug in a regular keyboard and mouse), and with 1GB of RAM and a 1GHz cpu I’d say it’s more pratical. I’ll probably run a openSUSE/XFCE system on it (it’s currently running SuSE 8.0 Professional) and all should be well.
That is pretty much the specs of my test PC, which is an athlon-1100 with 1GB of RAM, with a Nvidia Mx400/440 graphic card. I have a 300GB hard drive in it (upgraded earlier this year when its 80GB drive failed) and I currently have it setup for a tri-boot to
freedos
openSUSE-11.1 with KDE3.5.10 and KDE-4.1.3
fedora 10 with Gnome
It runs reasonably well.
I have it connected via a hardware KVM to my mouse and monitor, such that I can switch via the KVM between my main PC (an old athlon-2800) and this even older test PC. Both PCs are located out of the way under my desk.
Before I got my hands on my current laptop I was using a Pentium I w/MMX at 233MHz which came with 64MB of Ram (I maxed it out at 128MB).
I successfully got SuSE 9.1(?) installed on it and it was sort-a useable. I was suprised because KDE wasn’t toooooo bad.
Fluxbuntu worked alright and DSL was probably the best one on it. Never did try Puppy. Fluxbox is alright but I prefer some sort of desktop environment and since I had dial-up at that time it wasn’t easy for me to get Xubuntu Alternate CD to try Xfce on it.
The opensuse minimal install is okay. There are lots of choices of light de to choose and add once it’s up and running. This is one of the best offering from opensuse.
The choices
I had similar machine with 64 MB RAM, and for me, best out of the box distro was DreamLinux.
Fastest one that worked was Gentoo 2007, minimal install. After masochisicly waited 2 days to compile everything I need, that was reallye THE fastest running.
Ubuntu desktop is incredibly easy to install and picks up hardware variations amazingly well. Probably the latest version is best. Download iso image, burn, install.