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

[Jeff Hubbs]

A fresh Gentoo installation is fairly lightweight except for the disk 
storage that Portage (the packaging system) takes up.  For kicking out 
Gentoo systems on minimal equipment, you can place those specific parts 
of your tree on an external NFS export with the expectation that that 
export will be detached (and therefore that Portage will be unusable) 
once the system is in the field.  Of course, for updates or additional 
software, you could always bring the machine in, mount the Portage 
stuff, and carry on.

Brian Pitts wrote:
> 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.
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