Lightweight Linux to the rescue!

Hi Jake, I often run 'Puppy Linux' From the micro SD card on my humble samsung U600 phone. The mounter for USB and in my case micro SD card can be found within the distro itself when running live. The whole OS is 128MB and manages to be very colouful. A great one for kids too.

@roger: thanks for the tip. I'm trying out Lubuntu & Xubuntu as we speak - will give Puppy Linux a pop as well (9 old laptops to install different distros on!!)

I usually run Fedora with Gnome even on old hardware. Gnome is the basis for Moblin, geared for NetBooks, and NetBooks are often comparable to rather old technology. Gnome has made a lot of progress compared to the resource hog it used to be. Of course the next big transition to gnome 3.0 (Should be in Fedora 14) could bring setbacks, but generally, the framework parts of Gnome seem to be getting faster on old hardware all the time.

What is left is just the GUI stuff that can be a handful for old graphics cards. Remove gradients in window borders, make the background plain blue, set it to moves only a frame when you move a window, and so on. Simple stuff that really does wonders on some old graphics cards. Or exchange the window manager bit of Gnome with a lighter one.

I run F12 with gnome on a Compaq Armada M300 (600MHz Pentium M) and it even runs spotify in wine without dropouts.

Of course I also remove a lot of unneeded services, install without LVM, and so on. Keep everything simple.

Warning: Fedora is very bleeding-edge. Great for getting all the newest stuff, bug fixes, etc in one handy package. But it requires some linux knowledge when you run into problems, as the problems may not be well documented yet. That said there is a very large user base with very active mailing lists, so there is lots of help available. Got the pioneer spirit? Go ahead!

birger

I'll back up @b1r6er by saying Fedora does run well on older hardware. This is probably true for other Linux distributions as well. However with Fedora 12 I discovered that it would not install on a system with less than 256 MB of RAM, using the graphical installer. However, it would install in text mode, but the caveat was that it installed a bare minimum system, and didn't let you customize the partitions or anything. In fact, the text installer installs such a minimal system that X11 (X.org) itself is not even installed. The workaround was to install Fedora 12 with the graphical installation, on a system with more than 256 MB of RAM, remove the disk and throw it into the smaller machine with 256 MB, and it ran like a champ. I believe the actual RAM requirements by X11 is 192 MB of RAM, but even with that, removing extra features of Gnome (if you choose that over XFCE for example), gets it to run relatively well.

I haven't tried installing Fedora 13 on a small system like this yet, but since it's newer I suspect 256 MB of RAM won't cut it. I'm curious if anybody has had any luck.

@birger & @birger: funnily enough, I've installed fedora on a virtual machine, and it trots along quite nicely. I'll give it a go on one of the old Dell laptops as well (c640 I think) -- I'm thinking the main thing that's slowing it down is the compiz effects. Who needs flaming flames & shadowy shadows?!? ;)

If you get your hands on something with some grunt, then maximize the compiz effects. They stun and are stunning!

@roger: the last time I set the compiz effects to stun, the room started spinning on a velvety cube & I was violently travel sick. Now, everything is a sedate shade of static grey...

have you tried http://slitaz.org/?? slitaz is a small 30MB OS that's based on openbox & lxde. you can easily add packages to it through through it's own repository and package manager. it runs well with a Dell 850Mz Pentium III Coppermine so I guess it'll run on a pre-21st century machine. ;)

@tuxkaido: thanks for the tip about slitaz, will have a play

@Tezzer: ahh, the extra work! I think I did try once, maybe back in 1999. I gave up after 2 days on formatting the hard disk!!