William Fulks
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.
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.
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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
good stable and clean distros
you can use Fluxbox ot fvwm as window menagers
and will be fine
ASKER
I ended up getting SuSe 9.1! Thanks!
So how do you like it?
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.