128MB system

[x2interactive]

Hi guys,

I was given an old laptop. It is a poor machine with a Pentium III processor and 128MB of RAM. I thought of keeping it just to surf the Internet and check my emails. The laptop currently runs Win98!!! This is a sin!

So I was wondering what decent linux distro I could install that can run smoothly on 128MBs?

All suggestions are welcome!
Thanks

[WarraWarra]

DSL linux = damn small linux or zipslack.
http://distrowatch.org/search.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_Linux
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions ... ributions/

Vectorlinux was good for me some time ago and installs to 850mb.

Might be able to get pentoo 493mb cd or mpentoo 213mb or something to work on this as well but it requires creative thinking to install it + chroot etc but is gentoo based.
I like the mpentoo as it has enlightenment = nice desktop and seems to run better than the pentoo one think it has gnome or something.

Either way with this you can still update with emerge similar to Sabayon. Think I copied the livecd folder from /mnt/livecd to the hd then chrooted into it and ran the grub-install or something. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/h ... xml?full=1 this should help , worked for me. Might also have to copy the /boot part over but disable the ram drive if there is not sure been a while since.

Hope this helps.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Also check out DreamLinux. That runs on 128 Mb RAM. See the last post in the following thread:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=8094

[Gigadelic IIDX]

i know back when i was seing Ubuntu 5.10 500MH/z and 128MB's of RAM works well idk about now

also win98 is not a sin i still love Win98 over XP

[Fitzcarraldo]

^Ubuntu/Kubuntu needs at least 256 Mb RAM if I recall correctly. Xubuntu, however, is designed for old or low-end machines and should run "comfortably" on a system with 128 Mb RAM:

http://www.xubuntu.org/

[turquoise]

Xubuntu is okay on old machines and I wanted to try it but it can't detect most of my hardware for some reason and wanted to format my whole hard drive on one of my machines... Another bad experience on someting Debian-based for me, but if it works for you, then it's a good choice and so is DreamLinux.

A good surprise on an old machine was Yoper. I had a major breakdown on my main machine over the week-end and I had to find an OS with graphical interface that worked well on my old PentiumII 300MHz with 64 MB of RAM to fish for some information to solve my problems. Xubuntu didn't work for me, as usual, so I tried that Yoper CD I had and it worked fine. The trick is to do a base install and install the rest of the packages afterwards. It's rather fast with Xfce and even KDE works, although it's very slow. The main inconvenient I found is that their repos are a bit limited.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Here's another one according to October 2007 issue of Linux format magazine: Zenwalk (http://www.zenwalk.org/)

Xfce desktop, so all the usual GUI stuff (except Beryl/Compiz Fusion). Compiled with Pentium II-class optimisations so fast on modern hardware, but it's backwards compatible to 486 CPUs. System requirements are 128 Mb RAM and minimum 2Gb free HDD space.