which version for old machine?

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1

Hi all,

I have an old laptop which has Pentium II 333 Mhz, 4 Gb of hard disk and 192 Mb of ram.

Is openSUSE appropriate for this hardware? If yes, which version should be the best for this machine? Where should I start?

Thanks in advance.

2

hswner wrote:
> I have an old laptop which has Pentium II 333 Mhz, 4 Gb of hard disk
> and 192 Mb of ram.

Sounds like a Thinkpad 570. If so follow the instructions in our
hardware list specific to that machine to be able to install.
Even for other machines follow the low ram instructions in the
installation documentation on the wiki.

> Is openSUSE appropriate for this hardware? If yes, which version should
> be the best for this machine? Where should I start?

I ran all versions of SUSE/openSUSE from 7.0 until 11.2 on the same
hardware specs. You’ll want a lightweight desktop/windowmanager, which
rules out KDE4. GNOME and KDE3 are okay-ish. If you’re comfortable with
it use iceWM or windowmaker.

Good luck,
Andreas Stieger

3

There are some ideas for lightweight distros in this recent thread:

Only 500 MHz and 256 MB of RAM - openSUSE Forums

I would not recommend running an unsupported old version (openSUSE < 11.0). There are security bugs in those versions and besides you will be frustrated not being able to run recent versions of software.

4

thanks for your replies.

it’s an hp omnibook.

5

On such a machine, I would run icewm as window manager, opera (or maybe chrome) rather than firefox as web browser, claws-mail rather than Thunderbird as mail client. Don’t even try KDE or Gnome with 192 MB of RAM. They need at least 256 MB to run. Spare at least 400 MB for a swap partition. Install only the programs you need.