I have a couple old computers and I’m trying to find an older distribution that has better hardware requirements. I’m looking for a GNOME 2 dekstop and I believe opensuse has that option in its installer as I recall (I put an old version on a VM one time a year or 2 ago).
My question is what is the memory requirements of open suse 10.2?
Hopefully I selected the correct forum, if I didn’t moderators feel free to move me 
Note that 10.2 is out of support so has no updates available
For a usable system you probably want at least 1 gig though you may get by with less if you chose a lighter desktop.
ok…
No i don’t mind if it’s no longer supported but that’s too much RAM for it’s age. Thanks a lot though 
side note: look at my nickname: Windows98. Don’t try to scare me with that “outdated” word 
It is not that you may not use what you want whereon you want it, but you can not expect getting precise answers on software that people here have either not seen at all, or have forgotten almost all about because it is years ago that they used it.
BTW, IMHO running openSUSE 10.2 in 500 MB as a text alone system must be possible. But give it a generous amount of swap and be prepared for it’s usage.
Windows98 only needs 32 MB of RAM
I was looking for a minimum of 128 or 256 megs though.
Been a long time since you could run a GUI in that small of a space. I doubt 10.2 would even install in that small amount unless maybe text only. Maybe try Puppy Linux or D.A.M.N small Linux maybe Tiny Core ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxgECS06NcE )
Hi, you are putting our memories to a hard test… IIRC OpenSuSE 10.x had a minimum requirement for 512MB RAM.
I still have a 2001 vintage laptop in the basement which sports 384 MB RAM (256+128 soldered in) and I was never able to install OpenSuSE on it, but PuppyLinux is still there and kicking (at least the last time I fired it up).
You might also look for a distro with kernel 2.4, since your box likely has an early version of ACPI (if any).
I recall testing “light” desktops on that box (maybe LXDE?) but I think Gnome 2 (or Mate) is out of question with 256MB RAM or less.
Anyway, if you are really interested I might be able to blow the dust off my older box over the weekend and look for what might still be on its disk…
I have a system here
i586 Processor 0 : Memory size:
I am running openSUSE 10.3 text only on it. It does what I have it for (basicaly making backups from other systems using rsync), but I remember that using YaST (ncurses) to update it (in the times that there where still updates for 10.3), it swapped like hell.
Once the dust settled, I found that my 2001 laptop has a Pentium III @ 800MHz and 192MB RAM, with a 500 MB swap configured.
Apparently I did several tests on small distros from 2005 to 2010: still on the disk I found:
Da*mnSmallLinux http://www.da*mnsmalllinux.org/ (remove the * before clicking… to avoid the automatic censorship 
)
with kernel 2.4, should run even out of 32 MB RAM; useful for basic tasks like reading old disks, basic editing, file or backup management.
Apparently current releases are still the 4.4.10 and 4.11RC2 I tested back then.
Puppy Linux http://puppylinux.org/main/Download%20Latest%20Release.htm
I had Lucid Puppy, a Debian derivative with kernel 2.6; RAM footprint is about 80MB with only the file manager open. Basic tasks can be accomplished with no effort. Nice to have as a rescue system on a test box.
Please be aware that the current release is a slackware derivative with kernel 3.14 that might be more resource hungry.
A few *buntu’s, ranging from 5.10 with CLI to Lubuntu 10.04 with LXDE, with RAM footprints from 20 to about 100 MB. The latter seems the best compromise between speed and functionality on that box.
I found even slax https://www.slax.org/en/download.php with a KDE 3.5 DE; a few hiccups apparently tell that it might be too much for such a machine.
As said, I did never succeed installing OpenSUSE, but maybe I didn’t try installing a basic X configuration with the CLI installer and then install, say, LXDE or JWM on top; maybe if you can have 128 to 256 MB RAM it might be worth trying with OpenSUSE 10.2.
It would be nice to know if you succeed. Good Luck!
As the others somewhat hinted,
You’d probably have better success finding a good fit by researching support for the specific hardware instead of looking at old distros.
Probably the most significant consideration is whether your hardware is supported by any kernels 3.x and later, those kernels started to include hardware drivers which makes hardware installation and support easier and performant.
Especially for a laptop,
A good hardware list can probably be found by simply Googling the technical specs for your laptop model (laptop hardware isn’t easy to customize).
Then, you’ll have something to research kernel support, or has to be installed with User mode drivers (which in some cases might still be done in a recent distro but doing it “the old way” following old instructions).
Old hardware may not be well supported by current kernels.
I have an old laptop (circa around 2002 or so) on which I tried installing LEAP. Although it installed, there were display issues so decided eventually to just run text-mode only, and that works fine. BTW - openSUSE Text mode, running today’s applications requires only about 360-768 MBytes RAM minimum if the app isn’t intensive. If you’re <really> restricted in RAM (like maybe 128 MBytes?) then IMO you need to be looking at something like TinyLinux or Puppy Linux… again, running in text mode only.
If you’re really restricted in disk space, you can take a look at some JeOS (Just enough OS) images which are copied to disk instead of installed. By trimming off as much fat as possible, with recent builds your starting OS will be only about 100 MBytes instead of the usual 700 MBytes to 1.2 MBytes using a normal installation.
TSU
I run 13.1 on an old 1.7 GHz single core Celeron, 13.2 runs OK too but the drivers for my ancient graphic card (Geforce5) wore dropped so to get a performance boost I kept 13.1 on it, note LEAP is 64bit only so it won’t run on old PC’s.
edit
if I remember correctly 12.3 or 12.2 still had drivers for Geforce2 I use to use that on my old Celeron before I found a newer graphic card.
edit #2
although my old Celeron originally had only 128 Megs of RAM (and came with win98) I upgraded to 2 Gigs, RAM is cheep now days and DDR1 can still be found, unless you have a machine that uses SDR (which is findable too but expensive as hell)
if I remember correctly the minimum RAM opensuse 13.x needed was 1GB
you definitely won’t be able to run kde4 or gnome with anything less but openbox, razorqt lxqt or lxde (maybe even mate) can run on 512MB, openbox will probably run on 256 or 128MB of RAM.
Hi
It’s also application(s) requirements, I have SLED 11 SP4 (32bit) running on an Inspiron 4150, but had 1 GB of RAM, added a 256MB module I found and now runs ok, not stellar, but ok… I just want the serial port working to talk to my sparc boxes…
Don’t know if you are still interested, but since I stumbled upon an OpenSUSE 10.3 KDE LiveCD I fired it up in a virtual machine and the results are as follows.
256 MiB RAM: KDE boots and is useable (to the extent that was expected back in 2008… don’t expect to do much internet work on today’s net!)
128 MiB RAM: boots to runlevel 3 (command line interface), somewhat able to switch to runlevel 5 with KDE spitting out a few errors but not really useable there
64 MiB RAM: not able to boot even to runlevel 3, maybe because of the LiveCD nature (the live filesystem seems to need some 100 plus MiB on its own.
So it seems that the minimum useable requirement is 256 MB RAM with a graphical desktop.
Maybe installing from the DVD and tweaking swap or the install process might work with 128 MB or so, but as I remembered I was never able to install that on bare metal with 192 MB RAM.
Anyway, this is just for the records and other viewers stumbling upon this thread.
Have fun.
I don’t know about 10.2. However, I used to run suse 10.1 with 256M of memory. Note that this was from before opensuse existed as separate from suse. It ran reasonably well. I also used it on a second computer with 192M of memory, and that was a bit slower (perhaps because of a slower processor).
I was browsing Distrowatch and came across Bodhi Linux which seems to support old 15year+ old hardware. The following is from their Wiki page
http://www.bodhilinux.com/w/selecting-the-correct-iso-image/
if you scroll down to Legacy, that is the section that may interest you. By the way they seem a friendly bunch on the forums too.