Best distro to use for older-than-dirt laptop

[wildman4god]

The laptop I am getting is a 133MHz cpu and 128 MB of ram, can anyone recommend a distro that will run well on this, I am looking at tinyme, but if that doesn't work maybe puppy or dsl.

[kestrel1]

I would think Puppy is a fair choice.

[sports fan Matt]

And possibly dsl

[Mehall]

Puppy or TinyCore.

[SuperSonic4]

Possibly Arch too

[Twitch6000]

Damn Small Linux Or Tiny Core Linux

*wonders why people suggest Puppy Linux when it needs 196 mb or more of ram to run well...*

[Chemical Imbalance]

+1 dsl or tinycore

[ufuxlinux]

If you have time and patience, you can build a Gentoo that suits your needs. Otherwise I would go with DSL-like distros.

[Rokurosv]

Hmmm Tiny Core, Arch, Gentoo.

[kestrel1]

*wonders why people suggest Puppy Linux when it needs 196 mb or more of ram to run well...*
Not true. I just run Puppy on a virtual machine with 88mb ram & it ran just fine.

[Mehall]

I've ran Puppy fine on 64MB RAM, it just needs more to run from RAM.


Oh, and no to Arch. Anything PI or older won't run ARCH, neither will K6 or K6-2 or Cyrix MIII since they're not 686

[bakedbeans4life]

Be aware with Puppy you always run as root if you install it to your computer. Running from a live CD with a readonly file system is of little concern. Once you install it on a hard drive it is not much better than the Windows 9* family of operating systems, just more robust in stability terms. I am sure that much will be done to remedy this situation and is in the pipeline. No point having a Linux operating system that has similar security credentials as OS's that even Microsoft has left behind.

[Chemical Imbalance]

Be aware with Puppy you always run as root if you install it to your computer. Running from a live CD with a readonly file system is of little concern. Once you install it on a hard drive it is not much better than the Windows 9* family of operating systems, just more robust in stability terms. I am sure that much will be done to remedy this situation and is in the pipeline. No point having a Linux operating system that has similar security credentials as OS's that even Microsoft has left behind.

Good point to bring up--I don't recommend puppy for this reason.

[K.Mandla]

There's a project that's converting Arch to work on i586s. It's slow getting off the ground because there aren't many people with i586s left that can participate.

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=65880

There's also a dusty old distro called Lowarch that evaporated not long after creating an installation CD for i586s. It's still workable, but the software is something like two years out of date. The home page is gone, but the torrent is still up. Check ...

http://linuxtracker.org/index.php?id=7ca348467875268f1c1dff1d9e77005e22d6a c7d&page=torrent-details

[DeadRobot]

Arch
DSL
Puppy
SliTaz - I'd say it needs the least RAM to run.

[aeiah]

if you want to stay in the ubuntu world then you could consider crunchbang linux. i don't know how well it would run on such a low-end system, however, but its pretty lightweight.

[Mehall]

if you want to stay in the ubuntu world then you could consider crunchbang linux. i don't know how well it would run on such a low-end system, however, but its pretty lightweight.

You can't stay in Ubuntu for anything less than 686, same issue as Arch.

Your options are DSL, Puppy or TinyCore. (or Gentoo or some old version of Slackware or something)

EDIT: Crunchbang runs okay-ish under 256MB of RAm. You would need to use the Ubuntu alternate installer, but if you had a 686 processor and 128 RAM, it should run.

[wildman4god]

Arch
DSL
Puppy
SliTaz - I'd say it needs the least RAM to run.

Thanks for all you responses, I am going to try tinyme because I really like that distro but if it doesn't work I will go with SliTaz.

Thanks again.