[ale] Lightweight Distributions (was Getting Linux on an old laptop)

[Brian Pitts]

Mike Harrison wrote:
>> I've got an old Win98 Toshiba satellite that I want to put Linux on, 
>> but no CD ROM drive and no Internet, but I can get it to talk to an 
>> old Iomega 100 MB Zip drive.  Any way to take an Ubuntu CD-ROM iso 
>> image and chop it up into 100 MB chunks for copying to the laptop or 
>> installing from the Zip drive?
> 
> If it's an older laptop, Ubuntu might be a little heavy.
> I've re-purposed a couple of old machines wuth DSL - Dang Small Linux
> and been impressed.

DSL is quite lightweight (heck, it uses a 2.4 kernel and busybox), but 
the following warning has always scared me off from installing it. "Damn 
Small is not derived purely from Debian, if you 'apt-get install' the 
wrong application you may break something" [1]

I haven't been very impressed with Xubuntu, the developers never seemed 
to have a clear vision. Most of the "features" of the last release were 
inclusions of GNOME apps. [2]

Zenwalk 5 (formerly minislack) and VectorLinux Standard Edition look 
more promising as lightweight distributions [3]; does anyone here have 
experience with them?

-Brian

[1] http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/dsl-hd-install.html
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GutsyGibbon/Xubuntu
[3] By lightweight, I mean suitable for a Pentium II with 128MB of RAM. 
A PIII with 256MB can run the latest Ubuntu well enough for me.