Linux Need linux for a 133mhz laptop

I'm sort of new to the whole linux thing, ive dabbled a bit, but never seriously used linux. Does anyone know of a non-text based version of linux with standard programs that will be easy to install and stable, but fit on the 1.3gb hard drive and run fast on the 133mhz processor with 32mb of ram. does anyone know of a distribution that will work for me? ive looked around but i dont really understand what theyre saying in the stuff about the distribution. thanks in advance!

 

no distro is going to be remotely kind to the lack of ram and CPU speed.

in fact i'd be suprised if you could get a useable X windows (the program that does the WIMP (Windows Icons Menus Pointer)) to run.

Debian is a good bet, but don't expect X to be pretty, tbh it might be best to stick with a text based one, you won't get KDE or GNOME (the WIMP shells) to look nice whilst actually running a program.

"Damn Small Linux" is well worth trying thou, but again, don't expect it to be useable

 

well, its got windows 95 and it runs quite smoothly, and it even barely reaches windows 2000s minimum of 133mhz, so it could probably work at least usabley so.

 

Puppy Linux Might be able to do it. Its the only distro that I know of that will even come close to supporting those specs. And its full of sweet programs!

EDit: I forgot the link how stupuid of me
http://www.goosee.com/puppy/

 

DSL runs great on my old Pentium 75 133mhz with 48MB RAM. Make sure you make a good sized swap file, or it'll lag terribly.

 

well, im downloading a copy of damn small linux, hopefully that will work fine for me, and it says it will run on a 486 with 16mb of ram, so a P1 with 32 should at least work. if i dont like it, i can just uninstall it anyway.

im not sure what you mean by that. whats a swap file? can you elaborate on that?

 

DSL I knew there was another distro that I was forgeting.

Im too lazy to explain, i will let google do it for you http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/s/swapfile.htm Hope that helps. On my old K6-3 i had an entire harddrive for the swap file and it seemed to like it. It was only a 800mb drive

 

i see, so its like virtual memory, sort of. i burnt dsl on cd but just found out while setting the bios to my external cd rom drive, it doesnt have cd as an option! its only floppy or HDD. and scince i dont have a floppy drive, it will be hard to install a bios update. what should i do?

PS, i have no USB, no network, no internet, and no removable bios on the mainboard.

 

Windows 95 in terms of performance rather than interproccess memory protection is INCREDIBLY better made than linux kernel up until 2.6 Don't forget that.

Puppy i think will have issues with the ram? I think it needs like 64meg minimum (given the image that it completely maps is some 50+ meg, enless it creates a compressed ram image...... but i still can't see how it would be able to function).

DSL (Damn Small Linux) i fear will have the same problem.

Debian, (www.debian.org) will play happily, but i think you'd find the windowing system (X) would crawl. As i said before.

BSD wise.... could try netBSD but i wouldn't even waste time setting up X (so just console).

NT4 this will run happily, as its as outdated as the laptop, will run far faster than 2k would, but **** all would run. NT4 is technically brilliant, a good 4 years ahead of the game. Will easyily outperform linux 2.2 or 2.4 kernel, and give 2.6 a very good run for your money.

 

well, due to low speeds (limiting my distro choices) and my bios problem, the missing floppy drive that caught fire when i first got the laptop, and a combination of other smaller problems, i think ill have to stay with windows 95 for at least a little while.

but what is NT4, is that windows NT version 4 or something? that sounds good, from what your describing.

 

windows 3.1 was crap, microsoft knew that from years before its release.

They were working on NT (New Technology) which came out as 3.5 which was so very stable, rock solid OS, it just ran virtually nothing.

NT 4 came out soon after, 96 iirc.
NT 4 was the predicessor to 2000, problem with NT4 is it has no DOS, so DOS games don't run (enless you use an emulator like "dos box"). NT4 i had on a 256 Compact Flash HDD on a machine of mine. Ran like a charm, totally silent on this 533mhz eden it ran like lightning, whilst DSL lagged horrifically.

NT 4 kernel is better in virtually ever way than 2.6 linux kernel, and massivly better than 2.4

NT 4 will run slower than it does in win 95 (because of the more complex kernel) but not *that* much slower. Software is the problem thou, but you can get everything that can coupe with 133mhz to run on it.

Myself i'd turn it into a music playing computer. Glamorous i know, but buy it a fairly nice PCMCIA soundcard, and just use it to play music of a network computer

To get NT4 (its not free) i'd recomend ebay, if they have a certificate for it (often on the manual) odds are its legal then.

 

Had a similar problem on my lappy, no floppy, netowrk or CDROM.. I plugged the hard drive into a desktop motherboard and installed 98 on it up to the point where you reboot to boot from the hard drive for the 1st time. Then I powered down, moved the drive to the lappy, then carried on the final bits of the install Didnt even have a CDROM on it at that point so just skipped past requests for drivers then transferred them later with a null-modem cable. Ive been told you can do a similar thing with Linux, and I intend to have a go soon.

 

I've got Slackware 10 running on a laptop with a 120Mhz processor, 24Mb (IIRC) of RAM and a 1Gb hard drive. I was just careful and selective about which packages I installed to keep the disk usage down, and use a lightweight window manager (FVWM/Fluxbox/etc etc). Here it is next to my 3.06Ghz Pentium 4 main laptop (before you ask, the little one is running FVWM with a Windows XP-alike skin )



I use it in uni with a 16-bit 802.11b wireless PC Card and it works well, except for the crappy battery life.

 

slackware 10 eh? sounds good, especially if i can get that same XP style thing skin. do you have a link for it?

*EDIT* i looked up slackware, its $40 for a copy! im not paying that! ill have to keep looking for another distribution thats free.

 

Whoa, whoa, no it's not!
http://slackware.com/getslack/list.php?country=USA

You can download it as a set of ISO images.

 

ok good, ill use this one, but the problem is that i only have 1.3gb on the disk, so hopefully it will be small enough to be good on that and still have some hard drive room left for stuff.

 

Choose to do a custom install and don't install packages you won't need. The main thing to remember is to not install KDE or Gnome!

 

I was going to suggest Gentoo, but I did some reading and it would probably take you a few weeks just to compile the base system

Sam

 

I'd heartily recommend Debian with a nice light window manager, I use fluxbox.