I have a tutor with a problem. He wants to send a whole lot of machines back to his home town in South Africa and has asked me to help. The problem is that most of the machines have 32/64MB RAM and only P2's with very small hard drives. I was wondering if anyone could recommend a distro that would run on these specs and be easy for people who have not touched a computer before. Ideally, it would run XFCE or something that is low on resource usage. I am looking at maybe Puppy, DSL or MepisLite. Cheers Nick
On Tue, Aug 16, 2005 at 10:53:47AM +1200, async(a)slingshot.co.nz wrote:
I have a tutor with a problem. He wants to send a whole lot of machines back to his home town in South Africa and has asked me to help. The problem is that most of the machines have 32/64MB RAM and only P2's with very small hard drives. I was wondering if anyone could recommend a distro that would run on these specs and be easy for people who have not touched a computer before. Ideally, it would run XFCE or something that is low on resource usage. I am looking at maybe Puppy, DSL or MepisLite.
There was a very recent thread with lots of suggestions on the nzlug list: http://www.linux.net.nz/pipermail/nzlug/2005-August/000489.html They might already have all the suggestions and opinions you need. John
All I would add would be slax, vector linux or Feather , peanut has a new name too try alinux async(a)slingshot.co.nz wrote:
I have a tutor with a problem. He wants to send a whole lot of machines back to his home town in South Africa and has asked me to help. The problem is that most of the machines have 32/64MB RAM and only P2's with very small hard drives. I was wondering if anyone could recommend a distro that would run on these specs and be easy for people who have not touched a computer before. Ideally, it would run XFCE or something that is low on resource usage.
I am looking at maybe Puppy, DSL or MepisLite.
Cheers
Nick
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async(a)slingshot.co.nz wrote:
I have a tutor with a problem. He wants to send a whole lot of machines back to his home town in South Africa and has asked me to help. The problem is that most of the machines have 32/64MB RAM and only P2's with very small hard drives. I was wondering if anyone could recommend a distro that would run on these specs and be easy for people who have not touched a computer before. Ideally, it would run XFCE or something that is low on resource usage.
I am looking at maybe Puppy, DSL or MepisLite.
I have found that although DSL, Puppy and other mini live-cds run fairly well on low-spec machines, they can be a pain to install to hard disk because of limited memory. I usually whip the HD out and do the install on one of my better-specced machines. You don't mention how "very small" the HDs on these machines are. If they have 500MB or more, you might want to consider a "full" distro. In this case, I would reccommend Slackware. Why? * The non-graphic install works very well with 16mb memory (it copes with even less!). * It is very configurable * You have greater control over which programs are installed (less bloat on a small HD) * The default kernel seems to be less demanding on limited resources than some other "full" distros (it is a bit of a bugger to re-compile a kernel on a low-spec machine) * It is rock-solid The objection to Slackware seems to be the non-GUI method of configuration. It certainly isn't for newbies. If these machines are to be set up by someone who is Linux-savvy, that shouldn't be a problem. The new manual is excellent! The inherent stability of Slackware should make it more "suitable" for newcomers than the flashy flakiness of some other distros. regards, ********************************************* Dr Denise J. Bates, School of Geography & Environmental Science University of Auckland Private Bag 92019, Auckland New Zealand E-mail: d.bates(a)auckland.ac.nz Telephone 09-3737599 ext 86592 *********************************************
The objection to Slackware seems to be the non-GUI method of configuration. It certainly isn't for newbies. If these machines are to be set up by someone who is Linux-savvy, that shouldn't be a problem. The new manual is excellent! The inherent stability of Slackware should make it more "suitable" for newcomers than the flashy flakiness of some other distros.
I am interested to know what particular aspect of Slackware makes it more inherently stable than any other distribution built using the same components?
<groan!> I just wanted to make some positive statements about an often-ignored distro. I have no desire to engage in some pointless flame -war..... Craig Box wrote:
I am interested to know what particular aspect of Slackware makes it more inherently stable than any other distribution built using the same components?
Perhaps you should direct that question to Patrick Volkerding. A rough indication of "stability" might be guaged from the quantity and frequency of patches since each release: Compare the deluge from Mandriva and Fedora with that of Slackware. My conclusion is that quality control takes second place to the pursuit of bleeding edge features in Mandriva and Fedora. Apart from this, I can only offer some observations based on my own experiences.... My own machines, running Slackware, work just fine. One of the reasons that I don't post to this list is that I don't have any problems with Slackware. It just goes! I also have installed Linux on quite a few of the computers of elderly friends. Initially, I thought that Mandrake (as it was called then) would be the most suitable for these newbies. I was wrong. One of the "advantages" of Mandrake was the pretty GUI-based configuration. _None_ of my friends were prepared to configure their own machines: As I ended up doing it anyway, the GUI was of no use to me. Another "advantage" was supposed to be the ease of updating: When my friends saw how long they would have to have their dial-up modem tied up with even the bug-fixes and security-fixes, they baulked. "Stability" problems with Mandrake included crashes, locking up at the point that X started, erratic shutdowns and mounting of CD. I have since replaced all but one of the Mandrake installations with Slackware. All the above problems disappeared. It is a case of configure it once with Slackware and that's it. So far, I have _never_ had to call back to any of my friends to fix a fault directly related to the core Slackware installation. I believe that unstable software (or hardware) will really discourage newcomers far more than a the absence of a couple of flashy GUI-based tools. That is why I recommend Slackware. I concede that there are other very stable distros out there. When you apply the constraints of limited memory and HD space the field thins out quite a bit. I am not familiar enough with these other distros to comment, so I won't. regards, ********************************************* Dr Denise J. Bates, School of Geography & Environmental Science University of Auckland Private Bag 92019, Auckland New Zealand E-mail: d.bates(a)auckland.ac.nz Telephone 09-3737599 ext 86592 *********************************************
* Craig Box <craig(a)dubculture.co.nz> [2005-08-16 09:40]:
I am interested to know what particular aspect of Slackware makes it more inherently stable than any other distribution built using the same components?
The packaging policy, mostly. • At least something like 80% of the packages in Slackware are compiled from unpatched source as they come straight from their authors. Pat refuses to package anything that requires a bunch of patches to make it work acceptably. Compare even to Debian or the like, where packages and their interactions can take a long time to stabilize, in no small part due to the long list of patches applied for very many packages before building. • Pat also won’t enable far-reaching features that haven’t proven themselves in practice. Eg. Slackware has never enabled devfs by default (but offered udev support fairly quickly). It has also never offered PAM support by default – as a result, a slew of OpenSSH security holes never affected Slackware, because they were the result of interactions between OpenSSH and PAM. Pat still follows new versions of software relatively closely. He is just adamant about it being bug-free upstream instead of patching out bugs himself downstream, and he is very conservative about deep changes to the system. The result is a distro which has always been fairly up-to-date (particularly if you follow -current) yet very stable. I actually follow -current pretty much blindly, and I have yet to see any breakage whatsoever from living on the bleeding edge. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
participants (6)
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A. Pagaltzis -
async＠slingshot.co.nz -
Craig Box -
Denise Bates -
Gavin Denby -
John R. McPherson