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View Full Version : I need help finding a good distro. For a old computer.

Note360
October 16th, 2006, 05:41 PM
Any way, my school has these really old computers and one of my teachers for a tech course asked me to help him set up two linux servers. However, these computers are OLD we are talking 35mb ram and old precessors (intel). We need to set it up as a server. since it will be serving we threw out ANY gui. So it is going to be cli. No biggy. However, it wont be connected to the internet only the schools intranet (internal network), so it will need to be server ready or have cd-able respitories. Thank you, in advance.

So far we are looking into:
DSL (Damn Small Linux)
Slackware
A old version of Debian
A old version of Red Hat

Rejected:
Arch Linux (No internet so it cant be configured. WOudl have been perfect)
nUbuntu (probably to bloated)
Fedora Core (BLOATED)
Mandriva (Bloated)
Gentoo (To complicated)
Ubuntu (To Bloated)
BSD of any kind (The teacher has a hatred for BSD. I am afraid to open my mouth about Vim or Emacs. Don't want to start a holy war with a teacher)
NeoLithium
October 16th, 2006, 05:45 PM
I'd be voting towards the DSL or slack; they would probably be ideal for that. They stay small and continue to be upated easily unlike the long lost versions of Debian and RedHat ;)
justin whitaker
October 16th, 2006, 05:53 PM
Puppy and DSL are two distros designed for limited resources, but they are GUI centric.

Some thoughts:

If it is going to be server centric, then any Linux without the DE should be fine.

The ALT and Server installs for Ubunutu allow you to install the server version...it's light on resources.

Slackware (as well as SLAX) can be made to run in very stripped down environments.
Note360
October 16th, 2006, 06:06 PM
SOunds good. HE was also looking at VectorOS or something like that.
Sef
October 16th, 2006, 06:08 PM
Vector works nice on old computers, and so does Zenwalk. Both are based on Slackware.
Note360
October 16th, 2006, 06:24 PM
I tried out zenwalk before on a old computer I recieved once. I will give him my newly edited list tomorrow. If you have any respitory help that would be much apreciated.
Iowan
October 17th, 2006, 03:02 PM
FREESCO (http://forums.freesco.org/support) is a single-floppy router, but packages are available ranging from Apache to Samba to Exim.