[ale] Dell Ispirion B130 laptop with 2GBdisk and 2GB memory (max)

[Steve Litt]

On Mon, 1 Feb 2016 15:34:32 -0500
Boris Borisov <bugyatl at gmail.com> wrote:

> He may meant 20GB. Puppy Linux is starting to get fat as well. No
> offense here implied. The only advantage us running from USB drive or
> memory disk and very comprehensive drivers and firmware collection.
> But if you tried latest "quirky" boot up takes forever.
> 
> But I guess that is the future OS are getting fat and slow and
> thankfully hardware manufacturers are able to put 4-8 cores in chip
> for next to nothing.
> 
> Slim distro building around busybox is Slitaz. ISO is 50 MB installed
> on HDD is around 320. You get desktop file manager browser and
> web-based control panel.
> 
> But only my opinion.

Nobody can argue that today's Linux can run on my 1998 Pentium II
300mhz with 16*M*B of RAM, like Win98 or 1999 Red Hat 5.1 could do. But
that sort of misses the point: My Pentium II300 cost me about $2K in
December 1998.

AFAIK, any distro except compile it yourself Funtoo and Gentoo can
install and fit on a 16GB thumb drive. I think most current Linuxes can
perform simple duties on a computer with 500Mhz single CPU and 512MB
RAM, as long as you install OpenBox or fvwm or IceWM as the window
manager, and don't use pigs like LibreOffice and Firefox.

Think about 500Mhz and 512MB: When was the last time anyone sold a
computer like that? Over a decade ago. Any commodity desktop or laptop
manufactured for general sale since 2006 had at least 1GB RAM and 1Ghz
single CPU. My two laptops from that era both have almost 2GHz dual
core processors and 2GB RAM.

In other words, you'd need to try very hard to find a computer that
wouldn't run a couple programs simultaneously from any distro giving
you a choice of Window Managers.


SteveT

Steve Litt 
January 2016 featured book: Twenty Eight Tales of Troubleshooting
http://www.troubleshooters.com/28