oh and if you want the fedora base and rpm suport I think puppry has these too But I am hooked on featherlinux personally, Read the forums and look at robs level of comitment and you will see why. Gavin Denby wrote:
Short and sweet. Look up featherlinux. http://featherlinux.berlios.de or DSL - Damn Small Linux.
I have a 486 running dsl ok, not super fast but ok, and with 32 meg of ram, on a p233 mobile with mmx ( not a PII ) laptop with 64 meg of ram its faster than win 98 on the same machine.
its a knoppix remaster of 64 megs, has wireless, fluxbox as the desktop, and no accelerated X but for wordprocessing , e-mail (sypleed) and browsing (dillo and I have installed firefox too) its more than fast enough. Vncviwer and lots of apps are standard, and you can live cd with save your personal stuff on pedrive, hard drive (fat32) or floppy, or install to hard drive and use it as your distro.
give it a try and you'll feel better
on a celeron 500 this baby will fly.
forget the big stuff, look for the right distro, or roll your own with only what you need, and keep it small.
Craig Box wrote:
I recently had a Celeron 500 that I wanted to install for my flatmate to use as an internet/email machine.
All evidence points to the 2.6 kernel being better on old hardware than 2.4, and in general support for hardware increases as you have newer software, so I thought I'd try installing Fedora Core 2 (then test3) on the machine. I've heard good things about the XFCE desktop environment, so I installed that.
The machine started out with 64mb of RAM and took an ice age to install (I think it's about the RPM database needing to be in RAM at install time). It quickly got upgraded to 192mb RAM, which isn't exactly "new modern specs" but is a machine that was better specced than many machines we had at the recent installfest.
I ran a quick, responsive, usable desktop environment on a 286 at 10Mhz. Linux was basically unusable on this machine. Software took an age to load, you could hardly run two things at the same time, and it was constantly in swap. The options seemed to be "run Windows 98" (the OS the machine was originally shipped with), or get some sort of Linux distribution that was around the same age. The Fedora Legacy project provides security updates for Red Hat as far back as 7.3, but I really don't want to run old software. In the end I found a surprising third option - I installed Windows XP and turned off most of the flash visual bits and pieces, and ended up with a usable machine running modern software. Not something that I wanted to have to do!
There's a long standing belief that Linux can be used to revitalise old hardware. Short of using a terminal server of some description (which wasn't an option in this case), is this true? Craig
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