[ale] Best Choice for under-powered System

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Sunday 28 September 2003 05:52 pm, John M Trostel wrote:
> I've cobbled together a system for my son from an old 100 MHz Pentium
> (I) wt. 64 MB of RAM.... 4 M of that RAM is used by the on-board SIS
> video chip.  It's got a whopping 1 GB HDD, a cd drive and a 3.5"
> floopy.  An old SMC 10BT ethernet card rounds out his $0 cost system.
> (Actually $5, as I needed a PS2/AT keyboard converter dongle.)
>
> Right now I have the system running RH 7.1. Do you realize how many
> upgrades there are out for the stock 7.1 distro now? ;)
>
> He needs a system that will run Netscape/Mozilla/Galeon with Java
> support.  It barely runs on the system set up now.  (Mozilla and Java).
> Would I be better off running Debian on this box? (Leaner, meaner,
> slightly less than glacial...) Or even something like Vector Linux,
> which is supposedly for just such a situation? The ISO of Vector I
> burned seems to have trouble... Has anyone else tried Vector or another
> small distro for old machines that includes X, a nice windowing system,
> and a java-enabled browser?

I would use slackware or vector, or any system that doesn't require large 
amounts of memory, but bake sure it includes XFCE.  XFCE is a fairly nice 
desktop that is quite lightweight.  It is really more of a window manager 
with a few nice utilities.  

Also, use Mozilla-firebird, not Mozilla.  It's waaaay faster.

Michael