Installation on 1998 Pentium III

[cottfcfan]

What are you booting from cd? usb?
And have you set your computer to boot from whatever medium you're using?
I would have also gone for the latest version of Puppy 5.4 & used Precise puppy from here:
http://puppylinux.org/main/Download%...%20Release.htm

[oldos2er]

Puppy forums are here: http://murga-linux.com/puppy/

[verymadpip]

I'd be tempted to try 12.04 non-pae (big assumption on my part there) mini iso & add a window manager, panel & such like afterwards.

It's the method that revived a 2000/2001 TC1000 tablet for me. Flash performance is spectacularly bad though, & I've not even installed Java.

Non-pae mini iso available on this page:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Lu...MinimalInstall

[CHERRYPOP]

What are you booting from cd? usb?
And have you set your computer to boot from whatever medium you're using?
I would have also gone for the latest version of Puppy 5.4 & used Precise puppy from here:
http://puppylinux.org/main/Download%...%20Release.htm

Booted from CD-Rom in settings.
I only have one disc left to burn now so i will do exactly what you tell me to now.
I thought downloading an older version of puppy would suit the old computer.
I am now downloading Precise Puppy

[kurt18947]

Puppy is about as light as it gets , I think. I'm running Xubuntu 12.04 on a PIII notebook with 512 MB. RAM. It works quite well except for flash. Flash doesn't run at all. I doubt the more demanding graphics distros like Ubuntu or Mint are going to work. This doesn't help now but I use DVD-RWs for distro hopping. Older machines may not boot from a USB drive but most will boot from a DVD-RW in my experience. Another distro that works pretty well on my old machine is PC LinuxOS but they march to their own drummer. Lubuntu is light and still in the *buntu family but I had installer problems with Lubuntu 12.04. Xubuntu installed perfectly.

[Jerry N]

My first use of Ubuntu was to attempt to resurrect old machines like yours. This was in 2007 and the only version of Ubuntu that provided minimally acceptable performance (acceptable to me, that is) was Xubuntu 6.06. I never could make it print though. Damn Small Linux should work and the developer seems to have renewed his interest in it in the last year or so. DSL is pretty weird in general and its printing is even weirder. I tried dozens of so called "lite" linux distros and none provided better performance than DSL. I found that old old old Windows 2000 worked far better (on these old machines) than any linux distro but I wouldn't connect to the internet with it. I gave up and scrapped the old machines, except for the 1999 Toshiba laptop with Windows 2000 that I use to control a Ten-Tec short wave receiver. I was never able to install any version of linux on that Toshiba.

Jerry

[quarkhirad]

hey Cherrypop

Hi i have never tried puppy linux. Though i have tried dsl linux on a pentium p4 with 2X 128mb (i think it was a SD ram and not DDR someone please correct me if i am wrong) from a usb stick. Off course to speed things up i loaded the image onto the ram (i think it is the toram command in the boot options again someone please correct me if i am wrong). It worked very well. Infact the guy who owned the computer gave up his windows and just used dsl. So in general i would agree with jerry and say give the latest version of DSL (damn small linux) a try.

Infact honestly while reading your request (the first post in this thread). My reaction was why ubuntu 12.10 just try dsl.
hope it should work. Off course please no offense to ubuntu users. Infact i am currently using firefox browser in ubuntu 12.10 to type this post. LOL