Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of William Fulks
William FulksFlag for United States of America

asked on

Linux on a P100 with 96 megs RAM

I have an old Pentium 100 system collecting dust at my parent's house, and I thought putting Linux on it just to play around.

Can anyone recommend a distribution that would work best on a system that old, or am I just wasting my time.  The machine has 96 megs of ram and a 4mb video card.
Avatar of Anton74
Anton74
Flag of United States of America image

It will work just fine.

Linux is very flexible, and you can choose to work with or without a graphical user interface, or avoid using a "heavyweight". Typically, the graphical user interface (aka "X" or "X-Windows" in Linux) will typically be the most resource-hungry of all the operating system components. The heavier graphical desktop environments, notably Gnome and KDE, will likely tax that system beyond comfort, although I'm sure it could be made to work. There are plenty of lighter weight window managers that should work just fine. I was very satisfied with IceWM several years ago on a 486 (now I'm exclusively using the command line in a server environment).

As for distributions, I used Red Hat on that desktop system a few years back, and I was perfectly satisfied with it. Now I'm using Debian, and I'm quite happy with it, too. What's best for you depends a lot on your personal preference and experience.

Here are some pointers about various distributions: http://linux.about.com/cs/linux101/a/distros.htm

Sadly, Debian is not on that list. But, reasons to choose Debian are: http://www.debian.org/intro/why_debian

The Linux Documentation Project can be found at http://tldp.org

On that site, the "Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide" can be read at http://tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/index.html

Good luck.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Karl Heinz Kremer
Karl Heinz Kremer
Flag of United States of America image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
i will reccomend you Slackware or Debian
good stable and clean distros
you can use Fluxbox ot fvwm as window menagers
and will be fine
Avatar of William Fulks

ASKER

I ended up getting SuSe 9.1!  Thanks!
So how do you like it?