[ale] Old Laptop

Preston Boyington PBoyington at polyengineering.com
Fri Jun 27 07:43:29 EDT 2003





> Robert Coggins wrote:
> > Hey all!
> > 
> > I was just wondering...
> > 
> > I have an old 90Mhz   yes that is Niner Zero laptop that I 
> would like to
> > put linux on.. I tried my  latest CD of RH 8.0 but of course no go
> > because of memory.  It has 16 M RAM  any suggestions on distro and
> > version?  Thank!
> > 


I run Debian "Woody" (3.0) on my old Compaq T4130 (133mhz-32mb).  If you stay away from the large interfaces like KDE / Gnome and run something like Blackbox/Fluxbox or some of the other lighter window managers you will be good to go for e-mail (don't use Evolution try Kmail / Sylpheed) and word processing.  Surfing will be annoying, but manageable if you use something like Mozilla Phoenix/Firebird.

Even better is if you use the command line.  Mp3blaster will play all your tunes while Mutt gets your email and you surf with Lynx.  Word processing is achieved by using any number of command line editors.

It's really not bad if you are a bit patient.  Also you can control other machines on your home network with TightVNC.


Also try to find another 16 mb of ram, it will help all around.


Other than Debian there is Slackware or the BSD's (NetBSD or FreeBSD come to mind).  But that is beyond the scope of this particular e-mail.

Just my suggestions.


Preston







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