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

[DJ-Pfulio]

386sx16 with 1 MB memory for me. I'd guess the HDD was 20MB.
It had X/Windows, barely.

A few years later and I'd swapped that out for a 486dx/33 - needed the math
coprocessor to do flight simulation towards an instrument rating.

If you need a lite-distro, consider TinyCore - 12MB includes X/Windows and it
should run on i386 CPU. That Pentium M should fly with it.  If you want more in
a distro, look at TinyCorePlus - about 70MB last time I checked.


On 02/01/2016 07:14 PM, Jim Lynch wrote:
> I agree, my first Linux system ran on a 386sx16 with 8 MB memory and a 30MB drive.
> 
> No gui desktop however.
> 
> Jim.
> 
> On 02/01/2016 06:24 PM, Steve Litt wrote:
>> 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.
>>