Hello,
I have read somewhere in the Suse web pages that there are thin versions which can be installed in old (low RAM) computers. Unfortunately I didn’t make a note and now I can’t find this information.
Can anybody help?
Thanks,
How low is your memory? Are you perhaps thinking of Kiwi LTSP for thin clients?
I’m just trying to recycle old 128Mb computers that had windows 98.
You could use them as thin clients, but for diskfull installs, even with 256MB you’d face a struggle with openSUSE.
Try another distro, e.g. Puppy, AntiX, Crunchbang, etc.
I’ll look them up, thank you.
What kind of chip do you have? Pentium I, II? and at what speed?
I have a laptop with a Pentium I (w/MMX) at 233 MHz and 128 MB of Ram plus until about last year or so my main machine was a Pentium III @ 500 Mhz with 256 MB of Ram.
Thankfully I’ve moved up to 1.4 GHz with 512 Ram! 
On my Pentium 1, I tried
- D*mnSmallLinux, which works great
- TinyMewhich worked pretty good
- Fluxbuntuwhich I don’t know if it is still being developed (I think they moved to Crunchbang)
- SuSE 9.1, although it was really slow.
and currently I have
Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS running on it which I am using for demonstration purposes (a portable server if you will)
Also read the minimum requirements of those distros. E.g. inspite of the stress on low end machines, AntiX’s default kernel requires a i686, and unfortunately an AMD K6 doesn’t qualify due to the lack of the CMOV instruction. But a Celeron qualifies. This little issue I fixed by installing the i486 (i586 also feasible) kernel from the Debian repo.
I tried updating my TinyMe install just for kicks the other night, and it seems that some of the base packages from PCLinuxOS have disappeared so the update could not proceed. It seems that TinyMe is in the process of regrouping, with some other distros, as Unity Linux.
I have 11.2 and KDE 4.3 running on a Celeron with 256 MB. It works fine but I could not install it. I have been upgrading, in steps, since 10.3 which was the last I could install from a disk.
On machines with less than 256 create a " swap " partition before the install with a live CD or Parted Magic disk. I installed 10.3 on an old Dell /w 128 ram with this method, used xfce desktop installed unnecessary apps like Beagle and it runs good still.
Lots of possibilities… I’ll try them and see what works for us. Thank you!
I had an old p233 with 128MB of RAM, and I ran Slackware on it. You don’t necessarily need a specialized distro.
But the original question is still interesting… is there really a thin Suse?
They are only “specialised” in the sense that they are trying to replicate (most of) the experience of a heavier distro using lighter software, but trying to hang on to things like dependency resolution. Of course if you want to build from the ground up, then you can admit a whole lot more distros, like Debian, LFS, TinyCore and so forth.
Yeah, that’s true. I guess those specialized distros really take the configuration burden off of the user’s shoulders.
The DSL (darn small linux) version I have used on the old system was running a 2.4 Kernel instead of the 2.6 (practically) everybody’s using now.
Other than that it uses lighter applications, a number of them being CLI applications set up to run in a terminal to give the “feel” of being a GUI app.