Hey there - I'm curious: are there any Linux OSs that are very simple, small, and not nearly as draining for the system? Basically, I have a few extra boxes in my room from a while ago, and I was wanting to install a simple Linux distro to have available next to my Mac. Here are the stats for the two PC boxes that have them on a sticker: PC#1: 233 Mhz P1, 64 MB RAM, 4.3 MB HD. (currently unbelievably slow with Fedora) PC#2: 533 Mhz P2, 64 MB RAM, 8.1 MB HD. (currently FreeBSD - and ick) There's a third computer, but the stats aren't worth posting because frankly, all I could get running was a single DOS partition for my DOS games (yay ZZT, yay Pool of Radiance D&D Gold-Box set, yay Jill of the Jungle). So what do you think? Is there a smaller Linux distro for me?
Damn small linux is the best if you want a simple linux but gentoo can be faster than dsl with fluxbox
A lot of distros have server installs which only installs the basic system with no GUI or useless bloat. Then you just have to install stuff you need, + a light window manager (eg Fluxbox).
I tried a distro called Puppy Linux a while ago and was pleased - ran it off a flash stick and it was pretty fast on an old Duron. I think it uses xfce, don't quote me on that though...
I recommend Gentoo. It is very scalable and runs well on old boxes with Fluxbox, as mentioned earlier.
I'd probably go for Debian, gives you a full system, and the option of installing next to nothing if you only want a handful of things on the system, similar to gentoo. My worry about gentoo would be compiling updates on old machines, could take quite a while, during which the machine won't be much good for anything.
I don't recomend mandriva for that job but ive got it running well as a samba fileserver on a 1GHz itx box.
Debian, or one of the BSD's. I have a couple of old 200mhz pII boxen, one running FreeBSD, and one sat running NetBSD, and neither seem to have many problems. Joel
Which distro you run shouldn't really matter as long as you set it up correctly for the hardware. In your case anything running Gnome or KDE will be terribly slow as they are both large and resource heavy window managers, however you should be fine with a small WM such as fluxbox, blackbox, rat poison etc. Don't think that running these is a disadvantage though, I use fluxbox on all my machines with loonix, the most powerful being a p-m 1.8 with a gig of ram (still not great, but ample to run kde etc). If you don't need a gui (ie using the box for server duties) then don't bother, and just control it remotely. The 233 would be ample for a low traffic webserver, router, samba server, etc. Good luck
yes it make a big difference, some distro like fedora, suse and mandriva start like 50 unless services at boot, it´s too much
